Sorry it's been a while since I've written anything but it's been a little hectic around here lately. Asha decided that a stint in the US wouldn't be complete without a trip through the American medical system. So, she decided to go ahead and break her arm.
The long and short of it is that she fell off her bike right onto her elbow. By the time David and had carried her and her bike back to her house she was crying but not in that hysterical, shrieky way that severely injured kids cry. It was pretty swollen so we decided to take her to the hospital to get it checked out. After waiting a couple of hours and reading every single story in our Robert Munsch anthology we finally saw a doctor who very helpfully told us that she didn't see a fracture on the xray but elbow fractures are notoriously hard to see so we might want to see someone else but it might be fine but if we want we can go to an orthopaedic hospital just in case...if we want...maybe. I know that ER doctors are not specialists and can't be expected to know everything but how about giving us some good, solid information to help us out! I'm all over being an empowered patient but I expect a doctor to at least give some guidance when a decision needs to be made.
So Asha was in fairly good spirits at this point and we decided that a kid with a broken arm would be significantly more miserable. We decided to see if the swelling went down over the following couple of days and go to the orthopaedic hospital if things hadn't improved. The next day I got a call from a Dr. Dash (isn't that a fabulous name?!). He had reviewed the x-ray and suspected a fracture and suggested we get it checked out. So I dutifully packed Asha up and headed to the hospital that the doctor from the night before had mentioned in her useless rambling.
My heart sank as we entered the waiting room of the orthopaedic hospital. It was packed with families waiting to be seen by the doctor. I saw a long wait ahead of us. I also couldn't help but notice that 95% of the people there were Latino the majority of which didn't speak English. Don't white people break their bones sometimes? The only other white people there were the wierdest family I've ever seen. The son was in his early 20's and was showing off his transformer toy to his grandpa. I thought that maybe he was cognitively delayed or something but I'm pretty sure he was just really wierd. He kept yelling at his mom and telling her what to do while she played some game on her cell phone and loudly commented about it.
You know how they say there are stages of grief? Well for Asha there were a series of stages of meltdown. It began with indifference followed by excitement because there were TV's everywhere for her to watch! I must say, I don't have a whole lot of positive things to say about television but it sorta saved my life that day. I can only read Murmel Murmel Murmel so many times! The next stage of meltdown was anger when the masses of other kids in the waiting room wanted to share her toys. She lost her ever-loving mind whenever anyone went near her dress-up bears and I had to put them all away.
This was followed by a very very long stage of boredom. She was prepared to do cartwheels on her sore arm in order to get out of there. I was also starting to think that it was all a waste of time and we were going to wait all day to find out she was fine. But I was "pot committed" as they say in poker and I wasn't going to bail out at that point. We'd had lunch before we left and I'd only packed a few snacks since I thought we'd just be a couple of hours. The cafeteria closed at 3:00. What closes at 3:00 I ask you!! So we ate Cheetos for dinner.
7 1/2 hours later we finally saw the doctor. They took another series of x-rays and discovered that Asha's elbow was indeed fractured. They couldn't believe that the first doctor hadn't seen it. They told me that they would give Asha a shot of morphine and try to push the bone frament back into place and put it in a cast. I was told that the morphine might make her sleepy which sounded a-okay to me! I had visions of lovingly carrying my sleeping girl out to the truck, driving home, and putting her in bed where she belonged. Well the morphine seemed to make her not so much sleepy as unbearably grumpy and beligerent. She screamed for her dad (who wasn't there) the whole time they were putting on the cast. When the x-ray technician took one last set of x-rays Asha told him, and I quote, "get out of my life". When the doctor told us that the bone fragment looked like it was in place and surgery likely wouldn't be needed (a very real possibility up until that point) I said "thank you" and Asha scowled at him and said "no thank you". Oh dear. So the last stage of meltdown for Asha that night seemed to be beligerence. I think her little 4 year old brain was looking for someone to blame for all of this and she decided that he was a good scapegoat.
The next day we went back to the hospital to have the head doctor check everything out and luckily surgery will not be necessary. I don't want to find out what general anesthetic might to do Asha's disposition! We also got a call from the first hospital to make sure that we had followed up with a specialist. I would love to believe that they had Asha's well-being in mind but I'm pretty sure they had lawsuit alarm bells ringing all over the place.
I must say that overall Asha has been such a trooper through the whole process. Of course it is her right arm that is broken which is her dominant hand. She has just carried on with life and eats, writes, and plays with her left arm without any complaints. I still can't believe how tough she was for the entire day before she got a cast put on her arm. I think she has inherited a high pain tolerance from her dad and her Grandma. David once went home from the hospital despite severe abdominal pains only to return once his appendix had RUPTURED! My mom once told me that childbirth isn't so much painful as "a feeling of intense pressure".
Oh, and it turns out that Latino people aren't more frail than white people (or any other ethnicity for that matter). There are orthopaedic hospitals all over L.A. The doctor had not sent me to the one close by at UCLA but for some reason sent me downtown to the hospital that's in a predominantely Latino neighbourhood. I'm not sure if we would have had a shorter wait time at another hospital. Part of me wishes that we would have known but another part of me wonders if I should get a shorter wait just because I have fancy expensive Canadian travel health insurance. My day was kind of hellish but it wasn't as bad as the lady who had 4 hyper boys with her (and I'm pretty sure the oldest who was "injured" was faking... he had the fakest limp ever).
Well Asha is now sporting a flourescent pink cast from her armpit to her fingers. She wanted her cast to be "every colour except black" but they wouldn't let her have more than one colour. They said that no kid has ever asked for a rainbow cast before. That's the thing about my Asha. She can be rude sometimes. She can be grumpy every now and then. But boring she is not.
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