Joey's Arm

Friday right when we had gotten home from a full day of shopping for a crib mattress we heard Joey start to cry. He was in the back yard and had fallen down the steps that lean into the pool. We have a built-in pool in the house we are renting. It is very deep and they want to charge us more if we use it so we have it dry. The kids play in there all the time. We use it to store all of our outside toys. It has three steps going down into it and some how he missed a step and fell.

He was crying a lot and was holding his arm. He was hurting, but could move his arm so I thought it would be best to wait a few hours to see if it would get better. We put up the Christmas tree and still he was favoring it. I wanted to take him in, but Jason decided to wait until Saturday as he could still move his arm.

He could lift up his arm and move it, but twisting it back and forth brought on grimaces of pain. After decorating the church for Christmas on Saturday morning, we took him into the ER to have his arm checked out. When the doctor came into see us he showed us the clear break in the radial bone in his left arm (of course he is left handed). I thought it was funny that his bone was not straight, but in an arc shape. I was about to say something to the doctor when he asked us if we saw that the bone was not straight. He told us that because of this, he would have to put a metal rod in his arm that would stay for a month.

He was prepared to do this right away, but I had just given Joey a small candy bar (we hadn’t had lunch and were starving). He had to fast in order for them to do the surgery. The doctor put on a temporary cast and we went home for the night.

Sunday morning we had to be with him in the hospital at 8:30 am. I explained to him as much as I could. He knew he was going to get sleepy medicine and when he woke up, his arm would be in a “pretty” cast. He woke up this morning so excited to go to the hospital. He wanted to get the sleeping medicine. He did have a slight problem with the booties he was required to wear. He didn’t want them on and he also didn’t really want to take his underwear off so they said that they would do that when he went to sleep.

He wasn’t too excited when they took him from us, but he went willingly howbeit with a frown on his face.

He came out of surgery about an hour and a half later. He was acting as Joey normally acts when tired. He was cranky. He was mad at the world and wouldn’t even shake the nurse’s hands. After about a half an hour of crying, the nurse came out with a huge syringe of pain medication for him. As soon as he saw that needle he tried to hide his hand and started crying much more strongly. We tried to tell him that it would not hurt as they were going to put it into the IV that he still had in. We had to physically hold his hand out so the nurse could get access to him. Once she had put in about half of the syringe he stopped crying and had this look on his face that was so surprised that it indeed didn’t hurt.

By the time we left the hospital he was his happy self again. He finally did shake the nurse’s and doctor’s hand. He is adjusting well to life with a cast. If he can get through this month without breaking the cast open it will be a miracle. He is running all over the place. His only complaint is about the itching. He thinks a mosquito got into his cast and bit him.