…I’m dreaming of a white Christmas….
Actually, ours was pretty “red”. We were hosting the family dinner at our place this Christmas, and Emily (our middle daughter, 6.5 years) was doing her part to get us all in the festive mood. Being the little ‘craftsperson’ that she is, she was making place cards and paper snowflakes to put on the dinner table. She was using a big pair of scissors to make the snowflakes. Well, you can guess the rest.
I stepped outside to clean off the slight dusting of snow on the driveway in preparation for the guests. I popped back into the house and Lupita summoned me upstairs to help out. It looked like a mass-murderer had come through the house - bloody tissues and towels everywhere. Em had managed to snip a piece of skin off the top edge of her left pinky and it would not stop bleeding.
We managed to slow things down enough to have dinner and for her to play with her cousins for a while. But, a few hours later after having changed bandages every 15 minutes or so, we decided to call the emergency room for some ‘advice’. I applied some firm pressure on the area for about 20 minutes, as directed. No dice. Off to the emergency room.
She was pretty fearful as we drove to the hospital, but calmed down a bit in the waiting room. She was especially proud of her admitting bracelet (see pic at right). I didn’t know what to expect at the hospital (after all, how busy could it be on Christmas night?), but we were there for over 2.5 hours. Em thought it was cool that she was up so late past her bedtime. The doctor used a hemostat (?) to stem the flow of blood, bandaged things off pretty well, and we were off. She fell asleep pretty quickly that night even though her finger was ‘throbbing’.
All’s well that ends well. A follow up visit to the pediatrician is scheduled for Tuesday, so we’ll see how that goes.
