Broken wing

My poor boy has broken his arm. He fell out of a tree he was climbing at school on Monday morning. He did a spectacular job of it - the red circle on xray below shows the bit that is broken. It should be over in the space where the blue arrow is pointing.


Thankfully I was just at home when the school called me. I got there quickly and asked them to call the ambulance for him. There was no way in the world I'd have been able to move him, he was in too much pain. He was so brave - I can only imagine how much it would have hurt and how scared he would have been but he did nothing more than a bit of a cry when the pain got too bad.

The ambulance took him straight to the hospital while I raced Ryan home to stay with Tom's parents (who incidently deserve a medal for all the times they have come to our rescue lately). When I got to the hospital, Matthew was still holding it all together. I thought going by himself in the ambulance may have freaked him out a bit but he was fine. After they did the x-ray they warmed me that he would be taken to surgery to have it repaired. I was thrilled to hear that the orthapeadic surgeon was they same surgeon who did FIL's hip replacement last October - he is a great doctor and a lovely bloke to boot. Matthew had actually met him in the past so that helped a lot to ease the fear.

Matty finally made it to surgery at about 4.30pm. He is now sporting a couple of pins in his elbow to hold it all together and will need another anaesthetic in a few weeks time to remove the pins once his arm has healed. For now, he is wearing a blackslab and will have his proper fibreglass cast put on next Monday. I think he's looking forward to the kids at school being able to sign it.

Here he is in the emergency room, looking fairly unhappy. Note the unnatural point of his elbow. Ugh.

Sleeping peacefully after surgery.

He hasn't been in too much pain since he has been home. He was very tired and worn out the first day but is now just going about things with surprising ease.

Kids are amazing - and you in particular young man, are the bravest of them all. xx

Flooding

Yesterday was a bit scary. We had such heavy rain on Tuesday night that by 8am on Wednesday morning the water was already lapping at the side of the road on the roads near our house.

By lunchtime, it hadn't let up and I was starting to get pretty worried about whether or not I would make it home that night. Ryan's daycare centre is in a bit of a pocket - the suburb has the Brisbane River on one side and only one major road in (with one other minor, flood prone road). I rang his daycare centre about 3.00pm who told me that the major road had been cut. I left work about 3.30pm in a complete flap, worried about how the hell I'd ever get to my son and hoping that the rumour I'd heard about letting 4wd's through would be true.



Traffic was at a stand still most of the way - it took me 45 minutes to move roughly 300metres. At one point I had Tom's sister driving up the Ipswich Motorway, Tom's parents coming from Toowoomba & me heading through the western suburbs to see which one of us would make it to the kids first.

This photo shows the point the road was cut off. I'm not sure what time it was taken but thankfully by the time I got there most of the water had dispersed and 4wd's were being let through - although it was starting to rain quite heavily again and I'm sure wouldn't have taken long to flood again.

We ended up getting home shortly before 7pm. A trip that normally takes me 40 minutes stretched out to over 3 hours.

Luckily The Shack withstood the weather and we had no dramas with damage whatsoever. The backyard is pretty well submerged though and will no doubt take a few days to drain away.

Hi there, remember me?

Wow, you know you've been neglecting your blog when even your husband starts making sarcastic comments. Sorry for the delay, friends and neighbours (yeah, all three of you...lol) - I'll try to make more of an effort.

So, first things first - Matthew's follow up Opthalmologist appointment.

Finally, we got some good news. The long month of removing and inserting his lens paid off - the fluid was right down. Unfortunately we didn't get an accurate measure of his vision in that eye as his lens wasn't in but from what we could tell, it seemed to be much better than in previous visits. Fingers crossed anyway. Medications will stay the same (unfortunately) for another 5 weeks, just to make sure that the fluid has settled.

Follow-up appointment 16 June.

~~~

Next to Ryan. On Friday Ry had his visit to hospital to have his teeth dramas sorted. I made the trek in alone as Tom had to get Matthew off to school. The day went as well as it ever can when you have to watch your child have a general anaesthetic. Surely that has to be up there as one of lifes most distressing events. Tom had the task of being with Matthew when he had his surgery, so this was all new to me and it's not an experience I wish to repeat anytime in the near future. About 30 minutes in to his procedure, the dentist called me from theatre to tell me that he'd done x-rays of Ryan's front damaged tooth and found a small dark spot that could either be:

a). a possible infection starting; or
b). just general damage to the nerve which means he may lose his tooth earlier than normal.

The choice I had to make was whether to extract the tooth while he was under a GA to eliminate any future problems or leave it alone and take the chance that the spot may not be an infection. Given that I'm not exactly reknown for my decision-making abilities at the best of times, I wasn't sure which way to go. I had to quickly ring Tom to see what he thought and after much deliberation, we decided against the extraction. Ryan's dentist did make it clear he was happy to go either way but I've been beating myself up about it since. Should we have removed it just to be on the safe side & avoid having to have another GA? I don't know. If I had longer to think about it I may have chosen to extract but I can't be certain. Argh, this parenting gig is tough sometimes - I felt like someone had asked me if they could lop off one of his legs.

Anyway... Have some photos. Here he is in recovery munching on sandwiches, ice cream, jelly & lemonade. He thought the lemonade part was just fantastic. Cute.

So anyway, as if the day wasn't harrowing enough for his poor parents, the good Lord above decided to throw in a dose of croup as well, just for shits and giggles no doubt. Now, this house hasn't been without a fresh bottle of Redipred since 2003 yet somehow he managed to pick a night where I was needing to get a new script filled. He was quite bad too, I guess being intubated didn't help at all and for a while there I thought we would be heading back to the hospital. We managed to get through the worst of it by sitting in the bathroom with the shower running and then pulling the humidifier out of retirement but it was quite hairy for a while there. I'm well armed for tonight - I have more drugs than you can poke sticks at.