"I can't believe I'm doing this!" - C Gets Some Stitches

You know it's never a good thing when your child's school calls you in the middle of the day. So this afternoon, when I looked at my ringing phone and saw it was the school, I knew the my day was about to derail.

It was the school nurse, who was very nice and reassuring, telling me that C had poked herself in the eye with a pencil. An un-sharpened pencil. While walking down the hall. There wasn't even any horseplay or other silliness to blame.

They told me they had the bleeding stopped. (Never something you want to hear, trust me. Yes, it's good that she wasn't gushing blood, but... you get the idea.) And suggested that she go home right after school. Oh, and they put an eye patch on.

Huh? Which is it here? A serious injury requiring a phone call, direct pressure on bleeding, and a frikin' eye patch, but you don't want me to come get her now? Talk about mixed messages. So I told my office that I would be gone the rest of the day and went to pick her up.

When I got there, she was in a good mood, and was wearing a piece of gauze over her left eye. When we got home, I took off the gauze and saw a gash about an eighth of an inch square right next to her left eye. Another half inch to the left, and it would have hit her eyeball. Now, the gash doesn't look serious, but I can already tell that it's going to heal weird unless someone does something. I was already afraid that the 'something' would translate to 'stitches'.

Now, Holly is out of town, and has called me about four times by now, looking for an update. I tell her that I'm calling the doctor, simply because it looks like it might heal 'funny'.

The doctor's office get's us an appointment and in we go. C has already said about three times, "I don't want a shot". You see, my daughter has a pathological fear of needles. She's not afraid of much of anything else, but needles are *not* her thing. We get there, sign in, and are taken back after waiting ten or fifteen minutes. I want to point out that C is telling me it only hurts when you touch it ("So stop touching it.") so I'm not worried about her comfort. Her eye itself isn't red, and she can see fine.

The nurse and doctor clean it up better than I could (better to let them do it, was my thought) and start looking at it. Sure enough, they think that it needs something to hold the flap in place or she's going to have a scar there.

Plan A was a steri-strip and super glue, but what do we know about plan A? It never works, that's what. After several attempts to get the strip to stick, hold, and do some good, the doctor gave up, and whispered to me, "I think a stitch is the only way to go."

Two things here.

First, C has hearing like a hunting dog, so she heard that, and is already tearing up. She didn't cry at all when she jammed the pencil in her face, but just thinking about the big evil 'stitch' is freaking her out. I blame Disney. Would you want this guy on your face? He drools.

Second, no doctor is going to do just one stitch. Not when more are better. Simple fact. :)

So I spend the next ten minutes, with D3 helping (he had stitches last year), trying calm her down, and coax her back to the table. Promising ice cream helped. Write that down. I convince her that it's going to be alright, and that I'll hold her hand the whole time. The nurse is trying to help by telling her, "When you are sixteen, your going to be really happy that you don't have a scar on your face." Well, C is having none of that. She is scared out of rational thought.

We get her to lie down, and it goes downhill from there. She kicks, yells, and generally freaks out. Can't blame her. In the end, I get her to lie still while the doctor injects the lidocaine/whatever and once that stops hurting, she calms down. A lot. She still wasn't happy, but she was at least talking to us.

How many of you read the title and thought that was *my* line? Wrong. About the time of the second stitch was going in, C pops off and say's "Oh my God, oh my God, I can't believe I'm *doing* this." I think everyone in the room about cracked up. She was a trooper.

So she got three stitches, we went to TCBY afterward, and she's feeling fine now. A few days and the doctor will pluck them out (I've already had to assure her that won't hurt - no needles) and she should be good as new.

Careful of those pencils, folks, they can be vicious.