Double Vision
Last week, Hannah fell out of our tree house and broke her arms. Yes that’s right, BOTH arms. It happened just after the kids arrived home from school. Isaac was working from home and I was at my office with our only car. Some friends had ridden the bus home with them, so without even coming into the house the kids all immediately climbed up into the tree house to play.
Not long after that Isaac heard Hannah shrieking. It took him a few minutes to take it seriously due to the fact that despite being told the story about the boy who cried wolf many times, our children have always been screamers. You know — just for fun. Finally, deciding that something must really be wrong, Isaac went outside to investigate and found a distraught Hannah holding her malformed wrist and saying, “I can’t move my fingers.” After helping her into the house, Isaac called 911.
A few minutes later our friend arrived to pick up her kids. The uninjured children greeted her with shouts that Hannah had fallen out of the tree. Tammie, probably picturing minor bruises and scrapes, responded lightly, “Oh, that’s too bad!” At that moment, a fire truck drove up to the house.
While the friendly firemen splinted Hannah’s arm, Isaac called to tell me what had happened, so I headed home. I was on my way when he called again to tell me that Tammie was driving them to Children’s Hospital.
I met them there and we went through triage. This is when we started to suspect the second break. She complained of pain on the right side and there was a bit of swelling.
Once she was admitted, they put Hannah on an I.V. and gave her morphine, which took me by surprise. I went into a minor panic attack, saying things like “My Dad is a retired orthopedic surgeon and he didn’t do it like this.” After talking with Dad and Sarah, I started feeling better about it. X-rays were taken and the doctor arrived, a very young-seeming Orthopedic resident. He pointed out the double forearm fracture on the right side, which is pretty obvious and the almost imperceptible buckle fracture on the left and recommended casting both arms. At this point, Hannah was pretty darn cheerful, being anesthetized by Morphine and a constant stream of kid’s movies on the TV.
They further sedated her, reduced the fracture in her right arm and put a cast on it. Then they had to wait until she came down off the drugs before they could star on the left because they had to take out the I.V. Hannah was pretty cute as she started to “wake up” telling us all repeatedly about what she was observing, which was a lot of double and triple vision effects. For some reason I was the first person who got back to one head. For several minutes as we stood around her bed watching her, she would look at the nurse and say, “You have two heads!” Then she would turn to Isaac and say, “Dad you have two noses.” Last she would look at me and say, “Mom, you only have one head.” She repeated this exact thing 5 or 6 times before it passed. I don’t know why it would differ from person to person, but it did.
Finally they were able to take out the I.V. and cast the second arm which was much easier than the first as it needed no reducing. They made sure Hannah could eat and drink and sent us home.
Hannah seems to be doing well. At this point, she needs a lot of help with eating, dressing, and grooming, but I expect she will be doing most of these basic things pretty well after a few weeks. She’s already made a lot of progress. She gets out of the little cast in about 3 weeks and the big one in about a month and a half. It will be interesting.
