Thursday, March 29, 2007

Head-Banging and Ear-Tubing


Well, it has been waaaay to eventful since my last post! On Monday night, we were getting the kids ready for bed, and Katie was all riled up, running down the hall. Those adolescent motor skills couldn't handle the raw speed, and little miss Katie flew headfirst into a corner and opened up a nice new hole in her head... It was extremely stressful for everyone as we quickly assembled for a journey to the ER. Jen took Katie and I stayed with Andrew. They went to Children's hospital 9as we wanted to make sure we got good care from child specialists since we were concerned about any scarring.)

Well, they arrived to find a waiting room full and were told they had a 4 hour wait in front of them. We called Scripps and found that they had a slightly shorter wait, but figured it would be the same when you work int he travel time. So we decided to stick it out at Children's Hospital. This decision was made at 7:oopm.

8pm

9pm

10pm

11pm

12am

1am

2am

3am...

Finally, at 3am, they get SEEN. I won't go into the full horror story of the waiting room (as I can already feel my blood pressure rising as I'm recounting this) but needless to say, we were furious, tired, worried and outraged, all night long. Thankfully, Katie received great treatment once she got seen, and she is now recovering nicely. It appears that they did a great job on the cut, and we are keeping our fingers crossed that there is no long term damage.

(This is the part where I decide not to rand for 10 pages about the condition of Califonia's health care system and illegal immigrant problem.)

I'lll be honest with you all, that night changed me in a number of ways. This was my first time dealing with trauma and one of my kids. I actually felt that both Jen and I handled it better than I would have thought. But the 8 hour waiting room torture chamber... that gave me way too much time to think about things. Priorities.

OK, so they got home at 3:30. Yes, it only took about 10 minutes to do the procedure to 'glue' her up. By the way, Katie was amazing throughout the entire ordeal.

Couple days pass.

So today we took Andrew in to get Ear Tube surgery. He has been having some bad ear infections for a long while and we finally decided to get this done at the advice of doctors and friends. We were pretty stressed out about doing this considering the experience we had earlier in the week, but I am pleased to say that everything went just about as good as it could have. The doctors were awesome, everything went off without any complications. Andy was a stud and has already pretty much fully recovered.

We were going to go to SB this weekend but decided to hang back, and just get some rest in. Jen and I are both pretty wiped-out at this point.

And last but not least... today is a special day for yet another reason. My dad, patriarch of the Sandwisch line, has turned 68! Happy Birthday dad! We love you, miss you, and hope to see you soon.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

You guys are great parents! Katie & Andrew are lucky to have you! Way to hang in there through all this. I've often thought about having our girls wear a helmet 24/7 until those motor skills catch up. Seems like that would help us avoid so many incidents! :-)

Anonymous said...

What a horrible week for you. Brings back so many memories of emergency rooms and fears all wrapped in love. Boy I would join your health care/non paying taxes people issue!!! I bet San Diego has to even be worse than Santa Barbara - and its bad here.

Brianna Heldt said...

I'm so sorry, what a horrible ordeal! (We have the same medical care issues here in Santa Maria.)

Glad Katie and Andrew are doing better.

Rachel said...

When we had to take Aubrey to the ER at 48 hours old I was petriffied. mainly because the waiting room was full of sick kids using the Er at CHOC as their primary care provider. Luckily kids that are barely 2 days old get moved to front of the line and we only waited about ten minutes. I also wouldn't wait in the waiting room because everyone was sick and I didn't want Aubrey to catch anything else. So I waited down the hall around the corner. I was happy to bring a healthy baby home three days later and happier that the only other trip to the ER since was for me. We are going to try to keep this new little one home for a few years before we go through that trauma again.

I am glad the kids are well. I think most of these things are much harder on us then on them. We just love too much!!!

Oh and I bought Diaper Doublers form Safeway (VONS, I think) It's like a pad for the nighttime diaper. Aubrey hasn't peed through at all this week. Maybe they could help Andy too...