Emergency room fun

Jamieson needed an elevator pass at school this week due to an injury. What in the name of all that is holy is happening in the elevator on the left? Is it in free fall? Do we need to call an ambulance?!

Related: it makes me very unhappy when my child is in the emergency room.

Without publicizing the specific nature of his injury, we’ll just say he felt terrible in his middle region off and on for a couple of weeks; scans at the pediatrician indicated it was nothing serious and he’d feel better in a few days; that didn’t happen and he ended up in the ER; he missed about two weeks of school over the course of this experience because it was too painful to walk. (And then he got “in trouble” for missing so much school and was required to make up missed hours in after-school tutoring, even though he managed to keep his grades nice and high. Insert eye roll here.)

He was hurting so bad this particular night that he agreed he needed to go to the hospital. I apparently said some magic words to the intake paramedic at the childrens’ ER, as Doc was parking the car, because they whisked Jamie back to a room almost immediately. The photo below is of said child giving the thumbs up when I asked him if he was feeling okay after the morphine kicked in.

They gave him pain meds, did some scans, and kept him for observation for a few hours. We got home in the middle of the night and all went to bed. He woke me up a couple hours later saying he needed to throw up and I helped him into the bathroom where we also realized he had a 103.5 fever. Then he said to me, “I dreamed I was throwing up off the end of my bed. I don’t know if it was a dream. I tried not to get any of it in the bed.” And oh yes, did he ever. He has a loft bed so it went SPLAT everywhere from six feet up. We thought he had contracted a stomach virus from the hospital, and the pediatrician we took him to a few hours later agreed, but in hindsight we are pretty sure it was just a reaction to the morphine.

Anyway, he’s fine now. He needed a couple extra days on pain meds (not morphine! just NSAIDs) and some time off school, and then the above mentioned elevator pass so he didn’t have to attempt stairs for a few days.