So far we have not been one of those families who spend lots of time in the emergency room. My friend Debbie's family are: in a typical week, one child might injure her back while Irish dancing, while another might blow off his eyebrows with a potato gun. Our emergencies have been fewer and farther between and have been, largely, of the
respiratory-distress variety. On the other hand, we've seen a lot of bumped heads. Both the boys have done unhelmeted dives off bunk beds, and Epiphany as an infant once fell down an entire flight of uncarpeted basement stairs. People fall off bikes and fall down on skates and trip and slam their faces into doorframes and run into tree branches with their eyes wide open and things like that; and in the ordinary course of things, we don't worry too much. We shine a flashlight into their eyes to make sure their pupils still contract and dilate the way they're supposed to, and we keep an eye out for things like dizziness, nausea, excessive drowsiness and the like, which never ever ever happen, but still.
At least, they never ever ever happened until the other night, when Crispina did a header out of the
big van. We were just home from a day at church -- Latin Mass, weeding the community garden, playing, Holy Hour -- and everyone was bundling into the house, when somehow, and I didn't see it happen, Crispina fell. It's a long way from the van to the ground, especially when you're that short yourself, and there's a concrete gutter abutting the driveway. Amicus, who did see her fall, first thought she'd hit the back of her head on this gutter, then didn't, then wasn't sure. Crispina cried and cried, which was only to be expected, and then she cried some more, which wasn't wholly out of character either, especially given how tired and hungry she was, but then, in the midst of crying, she said she felt dizzy. So off she went with Aelred to the emergency room.
After I'd made dinner for everyone else, I joined them. They'd been waiting an hour already; they'd been triaged quickly, Aelred told me, and then they'd gone to the bathroom and blown up a rubber glove and drawn a face on it. When I happened upon them, Aelred was reading a book, and Crispina was huddled in a chair under a blanket. On my appearance, she immediately began to cry and to say she felt sick, and then she was sick. "The nurses might want to know about this," I said to Aelred. Indeed they did; after that, the process sped up considerably. Crispina was treated to a CAT scan -- she scored a little stuffed kitty for holding still, albeit tearfully, while the machine tilted and whirred and the stretcher slid in and out. In the silences between takes, we could hear birds singing somewhere up in the suspended ceiling, which was odd. Crispina had been asleep on my lap during the wheelchair ride to the CAT scan, but afterward she was sufficiently awake to ride in the chair herself, and to remark that it was the best thing she had ever done.
The results came back to us with remarkable speed: no skull fracture, no bleeding on the brain. She had a concussion, and we might want to wake her up at two-hour intervals in the night, but otherwise we could stop worrying. Aelred took her to Macdonalds, where she acquired, in addition to the stuffed kitty, a plastic squirrel holding a detachable plastic acorn (I think the squirrel actually shoots the acorn), and I went home to reassure the anxious others that she was perfectly all right.
Now, whenever we have to go someplace in the van, Helier insists on holding Crispina's arm as she clambers in and out, which is probably going to result in both of their falling out.
