Stitches for Zoë

We left for Tennessee to visit Rosie on Sunday immediately after church. We spent an enjoyable Sunday evening with her family and this morning I told Rosie we'd watch Oaklyn while she took Ireland to speech therapy and went to a chiropractor appointment. No problem—Oaklyn's a cakewalk. 

Unfortunately, I...planned poorly. 

It has been so warm outside and while I knew there was a cold front coming in—it is, after all, winter—I didn't quite register when it would be coming in. I looked at the weather. It said the high would be 55°F (12°C), so I decided that sweaters would do for us. We could still go to the park in sweaters and enjoy ourselves at those temperatures. 

I did not realize that today's high would be at 12:01 am, but that was indeed the warmest part of today. The storm blew in with a fury in the night and brought the cold front with it. The temperature plunged. It was below freezing when we woke up this morning.

We southerners do not do well with below freezing temperatures! (Especially without coats!)

I woke up early with the little girls and let everyone else sleep. After Zoë and Alexander woke up we went outside for a walk, anyway, at the children's and the dog's insistence. Ireland had an extra coat hanging on the coatrack, so I borrowed that for Phoebe, bundled Oaklyn up, and went headed outside for a very brief, very chilly stroll. 

We came back in and decided we'd wake up everyone else around 10:00. 

Benjamin was finally coaxed out of his sleeping bag around 9:45.

He was in a rambunctious mood. 

By 10:15 the little girls were ready for "second breakfast" (or simply "a snack") so I took them downstairs to share a banana and warned my bigger kids that they were getting carried away and that they needed to simmer down. 

I was still in the middle of slicing that banana when we heard (1) a crash, (2) some stifled sobbing, (3) and frantic whispers of...

"You tell Mom!" 

"No, you tell Mom!" 

"No, you tell Mom!"

"No, you tell Mom!"

"Mom is coming!" I warned. "Just let me finish giving Oaklyn her snack..."

Andrew was in the middle of a bowl of cereal. He left it to go check on things because (1) those whispers were concerning, and (2) we couldn't tell precisely who was whispering and who was crying. 

He bolted up the stairs and moaned, "That's gonna need stitches!"

(Pictures of the injury at the end of this post...so be warned).

I shoved Oaklyn her plate of bananas, grabbed the paper towels, and bolted up the stairs after him.

Miraculously, we didn't get any blood on the carpet! 

The kids had been "playing" (read: roughhousing) with the pillow-fort cushions and Zoë ended up falling and landed too close to the wall. She hit the wall with her knee and then...landed on the baseboard, which is a square-edge baseboard...and her knee just...split open. 

Her hands were covered in blood from holding her wound. I took over direct pressure for her with some paper towels and just managed to put my hand out and catch the blood dripping from her hand in my own hand before it got on the carpet—champion choreography! 

I held her wound tightly while Andrew researched care centers nearby that would take our insurance—luckily there was a place not too far from Rosie. 

Here's Benjamin (repentantly) putting some direct pressure on her leg while Andrew and I got ready to go. We left right as Rosie was arriving (Rachel and Miriam were also there, so it's not like the kids were unattended ever). 

Here's Zoë in the examination room:

The nurse practitioner we saw was very sympathetic (he has a daughter around Zoë's age who is obsessed with KPop Demon Hunters). He asked how she did it and she admitted that she was roughhousing with her brothers.

"How many brothers do you have?" he asked.

"Two," she sniffed.

"Are they older or younger than you?" he asked.

"Both," she said.

He looked confused. 

"One older, one younger," I explained.

"Ah!" he said. "I see what she means by both. So, you're sandwiched right in the middle?"

"Uh-huh."

"Do you ever get to do girl stuff? Or do you always have to do what the boys want to do?"

"We play LEGO a lot," she said. "And...I have three sisters..."

"Oh!"

"Yeah, she's not hurting for female companionship," I said. 

"But my sisters are a lot older and younger than me than my brothers are."

"That's true," I said. "She is still sandwiched between the boys and probably does more roughhousing because of that."

The doctor agreed that she could use some stitches—if only because it was on the knee. If it was on her shin or something we might get away with gluing it shut and moving on with life. But the knee bends too much and the wound would likely keep popping open without a little help (especially with another season of gymnastics right around the corner).

So we moved to the procedure room. The doctor washed the wound and put on a topical numbing solution then he came back in with the needle to really numb things up. Zoë watched the whole thing.

"Do you have any more questions before I begin?" the NP asked. 

We did have one silly question that came up while we were waiting for the numbness to set in. There were two boxes of sterile drop cloths: fenestrated and non-fenestrated. 

Our kids think that defenestration ("the action of throwing someone out of a window") is a hilarious word. So we were wondering what the difference was between a fenestrated and non-fenestrated cloth.

"We like to keep our work space as sterile as possible," the NP explained. "So we put down these sterile cloths to avoid contaminating our work space. We'll use both kinds of cloths for you. Do you have a guess about their difference?"

"One has a window," I said. "Like a hole in it..."

"Exactly. We'll put that one over the wound so that only the injury is showing."

No pictures of the "surgery" itself, but Zoë was pleased that her knee was first fenestrated and then de-fenestrated. 

Once again she watched the whole thing. The NP explained step by step how he was making the stitches—wrapping around the pliers three times, pulling the other end through, wrapping around three times the other way, pulling the other end through, and once more wrapping around three times and pulling through. 

"You can do the next stitch," he joked at one point. 

He ended up putting just four stitches in.

"Do you do any fishing?" he asked.

"Not really," we said.

"Some people like to take the extra tools from the kit to tie their fishing knots. Do you want them? I'm just going to throw them away. Rather not waste them."

(There will be one more picture of Zoë smiling...and then there will be some bloody injury pictures...you have been warned).

We...didn't really answer that...but he gave us the tools anyway, along with some gauze and flex-tape (it's such a big wound that regular bandaids are tricky—he doesn't want any sticky goop pulling on her skin). I figure the pliers will come in handy when I'm (hand) sewing and just can't manage to get my needle through my project (it happens).

Here's her knee before stitches after we'd mostly managed to stop the bleeding:

And here she is showing off her stitches:

She hadn't actually intended to show off her stitches, but the doctor missed when he put the gauze on (or it slipped down) and blood was leaking through her pants, which made her feel sad because she hadn't actually gotten any blood on her pant initially (she'd immediately pulled up her pant leg after she fell and the wound took a minute to start bleeding). So we had to redress her wound. 

But, I think she will be fine. 

This was our first official time getting stitches for a kid! Pretty good for 18 years.

(We've had wounds glued shut. We've had a couple of broken arms. But...no stitches...until today).