Birthday Tumble

If you’re a regular reader of YMIS, you’ll probably remember that last year at this time, we were all fighting some horrible stomach flu right in time for E’s first birthday and that, after rescheduling her party for the following weekend, E got sick all over again, and I ended up in the emergency room with severe stomach pains.

Here are the posts (Balloons for Birthday Belle and The Moral is that Ambulance Rides Are Fun), if you want to reminisce. I chose not to. Ha!

I have no real photos of those typical first birthday moments – eating her first cake, opening her presents. So, this year, I wanted to at least have a somewhat normal party but, once again, she threw up on her birthday. Mark and I had already been fighting the stomach bug before she got it, so we had already cancelled her party and, once again, moved it to the following Saturday.

The week went by normally, and we all started feeling better, but come Friday, E sounded really congested and spiked a fever over 100. Mark had the same symptoms as he was recovering, so I hoped that it was just one last 24-hour farewell from this virus. Good riddance!

That seemed to be the case, because she woke up fine on Saturday and had no fever. I decided to just have dinner at the pizza place with Mark’s family, and I thought I’d make a cake. E and I ran out to get a box mix – nothing fancy, didn’t want to jinx it, was too tired, and wanted it to be easy for E to help with. Meanwhile, Mark was out spending the day with his father at an sports-and-hobby convention.

E hopped up on a chair to help me at the counter. I turned around to wash a measuring cup. Though E was still close enough to be at my elbow, I wasn’t fast enough to catch her as she suddenly toppled over, hit her chest on the seat of the chair and slid off, did a perfect swan dive, head first into the hardwood floor, and let out a blood-curdling scream.

The guilt set in immediately. It always does, as my mind shuts off, and I start to operate on auto-pilot. I scooped her up to check out the damage. The skin was pushed together to create a little sunken spot, about the size of a dime, on her forehead above her left eye. I nearly passed out as she screamed, but I kept it together as the following thoughts raced through my head (though, let me first assure you that she was absolutely, 100% fine): “Hole in head, skull fracture, brain damage, death.” This is Anxiety 101, and no matter how many times you work through the therapist-assigned exercises to “be your own best friend,” to “self soothe,” to “work backward” in order to “stop the train of negative thought” which inevitably goes off the rails, crashes into a cliff, and explodes in a fiery ball of doom, death, despair… in an emergency, even if only a perceived emergency, old habits die hard.

I grabbed my cell phone, keys, and ran out the door, headed to the ER where I was certain that they would have to reassemble parts of her frontal lobe. E was weeping softly now, as I darted down the stairs and the cold January air hit me in the face. Maybe the cold woke me up a bit, or maybe I just realized that I would have to put her down in the back seat and drive 20 miles to the nearest hospital. For some reason, I stopped dead in my tracks and looked at E. Her head just had a small red lump on it, and she seemed excited to be outside without her coat on, ready to go somewhere, anywhere.

I decided to do the next most logical thing – go inside and call 9-1-1. I got to the top of the stairs and saw my neighbor’s apartment door, which reminded me that he's an EMT and had told me before (when I called 9-1-1 after Ellie threw up when she was 4-months-old) that I could knock on his door first. So, that’s what I did. I stood, shaking, waiting for him to answer the door.

Instead, his wife opened the door with their 3-year-old son, shared a few horror stories of her own (even a similar ‘hole in the head’ incident), and insisted that E looked fine (as she happily watched the little boy playing). She suggested I call the after-hours number at the doctor’s office. I eventually got ahold of E's pediatrician who was working overtime on a Saturday (thank God) and who nonchalantly, and with a yawn, told me that, as long as E wasn’t “more tired than usual,” she was fine. She said I may want to check for other injuries, like a loose tooth or bitten tongue. “Who cares about that?” I thought. “Did we really just go from ‘potential brain damage’ to 'a loose tooth'?”

Huge sigh of relief. Cake baked. Happy kid.

Mark came home soon after, then my in-laws arrived. The day went on normally. Her party was nice, and she was happy to get some new clothes, books, stuffed animals, and a Little People Bus.

Though I cried a few tears before bed (my anxiety is always worse at night), I’ve almost fully recovered from the trauma, and E has happily been talking about how she “fell off chair and went outside.” I’m grateful that the story ended there and not “at the hospital" or with EMTs rushing through our door.