Hospitals and holidays

Last Updated on Thursday, April 19, 2012 05:30 pm Written by Cindy Nevitt Friday, April 20, 2012 01:30 am

When her father ran over her foot with the car on Easter Sunday, it was just the latest in a long list of holidays my daughter has spent receiving medical attention.

The accident, which resulted in a crush-and-bruise injury that requires the use of crutches and a morphine-based pain killer, marked yet another holiday in the hospital for our family.

What I found more surprising than the fact my daughter’s foot wasn’t broken was the nonchalant way in which the nurse-practitioner who treated her shared the information that “We rarely see fractures in this type of accident.” What?! Are you serious? This kind of accident happens often enough that emergency rooms have a baseline for it?

The answer is “yes.” Since my daughter had a 3,325-pound car roll over her left foot, leaving a black tire track across the top of her white sneaker and popping the rhinestones off the sides of her shoe, I have been told this same injury has happened to a co-worker of my husband’s, an acquaintance of mine who was vacationing at the time with a friend in New England, a waiter we know at Applebee’s and one other guy.

Perhaps someone should mount a “no running over other people’s feet while driving” campaign since it’s such a clear danger.

Sitting in the ER on Easter, I was reminded of all the holidays we have spent in the company of beeping machines, antiseptic smells and unexcited medical personnel. I guess I should have known from my daughter’s first emergency room run that I was going to spend a lifetime playing ambulance driver.

Less than two weeks before her first birthday, my daughter – a lifelong overachiever who started walking alone at 10 months -- slipped in the bathroom and opened a gash along her eyebrow. It was a Saturday and St. Patrick’s Day. The pediatrician’s office was closed, and urgent care centers didn’t yet exist. So off we went to the ER.

Since then, we’ve divided our time between urgent care centers and emergency rooms.

In the ER column: She had a broken finger splinted the day before she graduated kindergarten; a torn meniscus in her right knee X-rayed on her brother’s 15th birthday; a fractured wrist splinted and her leg braced a week after she graduated high school in June 2006 and one day before my grandmother’s funeral; more X-rays when her knee was re- injured when we hydroplaned off the highway on Father’s Day 2010; and such severe respiratory distress on her 22^nd birthday last year that I thought there was a chance she would die. Instead, she merely had laryngitis, sinusitis, bronchitis, uvulitis, pharyngitis, and the flu.

In the urgent care column: A sinus infection diagnosed on Christmas Day 2009 and a bruised hand examined on the day we left for a trip to Canada in August 2010.

There have been many other trips to the hospital and urgent care because rarely has my daughter needed medical attention on a normal weekday, though she did have a cyst treated in her eye the day we left for a cruise in August 2008.

At this point, there should be a wing named after my kids at Shore Memorial, because my son has had his share of scares, too.

He started off running temperatures of 106 degrees at 9 months old. Nothing makes you put the pedal to the metal like an infant who’s too hot to the touch, unless it’s a first-grader hemorrhaging after having his tonsils removed. (Yeah, that happened right after Thanksgiving.)

On a Good Friday evening when he was 2, my son suffered a corneal abrasion when his grandfather stuck a finger in his eye as they were dying Easter eggs. On Valentine’s Day when he was 3, he suffered another corneal abrasion when he got up at night and rubbed his eyes too vigorously during a crying fit. He came home from a seventh-grade camping trip over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday with an infection in his eye from an untreated abrasion caused by impaling his eyeball on a pine needle when he walked into a tree in the dark of night. In 2010, in a blizzard the day after Christmas, he suffered yet another corneal abrasion when debris-studded ice was whipped by the wind into his eye.

On second thought, maybe my son should have a vision center, instead of a hospital wing, named after him. He should definitely wear protective goggles. And my daughter should be swaddled in bubble wrap.

Kids will be kids, I know, but my two seem especially klutzy. If it’s true that accidents increase around the holidays, I’m grateful there aren’t more holidays on the calendar. I don’t think the hospital could handle it.

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