Diary of a Stitches Professional - Age 3

5:45 pm Sunday - Mom and Dad are visiting a sick friend. I am making dinner and Keaton is setting the table. Keaton is taking cups to the table..or I should say glasses. He trips and falls with a glass in his hand. Blood everywhere! I run to the bathroom to wash it off but of course water makes it look really bloody. Apply a paper towel, call mom.
6:00 - Mom leaves dad and rushes home, we decide to go to the ER in case it needs stitches so we swing by to pick dad back up.
6:15 Check in to Carden Children's Hospital at Banner Desert. They put gauze and wrap his hand. They instruct us to go to the waiting room, no food or water. Waiting room full of very sick kids...we don't want the flu so we wait in main lobby. Keaton enjoys trains. We wait and wait.
9:30 - Finally got into a room. Nurse comes by to take vitals.
10:30- Doctor stops by, wants an x-ray to make sure no glass is inside. I ask the nurse, can he eat? She brings peanut butter and crackers, poptarts and OJ, Keaton eats it all, poor kids been starving since 2 pm when he had a snack.
11:30 - Xray people bring portable machine. Take x-ray and assure us it's digital and the doctor will see it immediately.
12:30 am Monday - Doctor comes back. No glass, ready to stitch. Now comes the fun. Strap Keaton to a papoose board. Lots of screaming while they clean wound. Almost passing out screaming when they give him the shot right in his cut, to numb the area. Doctor pulls back wound to show me that there aren't any tendons cut. They clean some more then they stitch. 9 stitches and they aren't very close together.
1:15 We head home from the hospital.
1:30 Keaton falls asleep
2:30 Keaton wakes up screaming. Cries for nearly and hour. Get him to sleep again by taking him outside.
3:30 Deanna goes back to sleep.
6:00 Deanna gets up to go to school and make sub plans.
7:30 Deanna comes home. Keaton's been away off and on but is now sleeping on the couch. this pattern holds until 11 am. Keaton and Deanna both sleep off and on.

This is what he looked like after the hospital visit. We affectionately called it the "snowman hand" We weren't allowed to remove this for 24 hours. So he went to sleep with it on Monday night.

After that 24 hours they told us it needed some air and we were supposed to leave it uncovered so we unbandaged it and this is what it looked like. NICE!

Well I didn't really want to leave it uncovered for school so we cleaned up the dry blood added some polysporin and put a band aide over it, plus a little tape so it didn't fall off. This is what he looked like headed to school Tuesday morning.

All in all, he's doing well. He plays and eats and sleeps, just one handed. Luckily he tends to do most things right handed and this is his left. But let's not forget this is his third set of stitches. The snowglobe incident happened in Dec. 07 and the eye surgery happened July 08. He's a little trooper.