How to Handle Stitches, Cavities, Etc.

[Sasha at Parenting.com]

Do you live in fear of your kid breaking a bone? Be prepared for what to do and how to ease the pain with our guide to 7 not-so-fun health milestones (http://www.parenting.com/gallery/Child/7-Un-Fun-Health-Milestones).

Have you and your child been in any of these situations? What did you do to help your child get through it?

[giraffes_buddy]

That was a great article! You never stop to think about how you'd handle an emergency until it's there. Coming up with a game plan on the fly is hard work especially when Mom is trying hard not to be a neurotic mess in front of her injured baby.

I figured that one out first-hand when my DS broke his arm in a weird fall at age 4. Actually as they say, it wasn't the fall as much as it was the sudden stop.

First off, my DH & I tried our best to act as if it happened every day. Well, it does - just not to our kid. We didn't want to scare him or spook him more than he already was. By acting "matter of fact", DS seemed reassured that everything was going to be fine - if for not better reason that because Mommy and Daddy said so.

We opted for the local urgent care clinic to avoid the long ER wait. We were seen quickly, and the bonus is that they often treat kids with sport-injuries on the weekends, so they're VERY good with kids. The staff involved him in decision where they could (e.g., who gets to go into x-ray with him, what color bandages should he have, etc.). That kept his brain engaged in thinking about something other than the pain. My DH kept up that theme when we were put into an exam room. DS wasn't fixated on the pain, and he learned a ton.

The doctor gave us a choice of putting him in a hard cast or a removable cast (removable for bath time only). We went with the hard cast to prevent the temptation of removing the cast when we weren't watching, and that was a good move for a 4-year-old. We told him that it was like "a hard Band-Aid for bones", and that he had to wear it until after Thanksgiving. That gave him a concrete idea of when the cast would come off since "6 weeks" was a bit vague of a concept to him.

The clinic had a full-sized skeleton hanging in the hallway. We got a lot of millage out of talking about bones and "guts". Before we left, the doctor even showed my son the arm bones and used a grease pencil to show him what the break in his arm looked like. He was fascinated.

He was apprehensive to go back to the preschool, but we told him the the kids would think it was cool, and that he could let them draw on his cast if he liked. From the time he walked through the door, he was a minor celebrity, and that definitely was cool with him.

The next day, we made a "cast" out of a toilet paper tube and medical tape, and we all signed Giraffe's cast the same way the kids signed DS's. DS took Giraffe to preschool and told all the kids about the ulna, the radius, green stick fractures, sphygmomanometers, and x-ray machines. He was hot stuff.

When he got the cast cut off by a "real saw", he had even more stories. He nearly had me talked into dragging out the Dremel for Giraffe, but I was scared of having to explain stitches.


...which would have come in handy a few months later when we had to rush to the ER after "The Tragic Moon Bounce Incident of 2008". By that time, he was old-hat around emergency doctors, and he nearly giggled himself off the gurney when the doctor told him that she was going to glue his eyebrow shut. He thought they would use Elmers Glue.