Our Annual December injury...

Almost every year, sometime close to Christmas (and a couple of times ON Christmas), we end up in the hospital for one reason or another.  I blame it on Kyle...he started it by being born on December 23rd...we spent our first Christmas as a family in the hospital for part of the day, and it's never really stopped (and I wouldn't have it any other way...at least the birthday part :))

Last Thursday, Alec was playing a made up game with his friends at lunch recess...he tried to "attack" his friend, the friend "dodged", and Alec landed hard on his hands on the concrete.  His teachers cleaned up the scrapes, but didn't think anything else was wrong.  He stayed the rest of the day at school, but first thing when he got home, he was telling me about his injury, and I was having trouble understanding him.  He was out of it, pale, clammy, a little shocky.  Then I noticed his left wrist was quite swollen.  I was pretty sure it was probably broken, so when Cole got home, I took Alec over to Urgent care.  (I was actually pretty glad that the injury happened during "normal business hours"...all I had to pay was a regular copay, instead of an ER copay.  We are generally not that lucky with our injuries and illnesses.)  Urgent care took X-rays, and we saw the covering MD.  She showed me the X-rays, then proceeded to tell me that she didn't read kids' X-rays, so we would have to wait for the Radiologist to read it the next day.  Now, knowing what I know about reading X-rays, I saw clearly the fracture in his wrist.  I also knew from previous experience with Kyle that they wouldn't cast his arm until the swelling decreased, so it didn't bother me too much to wait.  They splinted his arm (it was really cool, they molded fiberglass to his arm, then wrapped it with an ace bandage). 

Of course, the call came Friday afternoon that we would  need to see Orthopedics.  We couldn't get an appointment until Monday, which irritated me a little, but his wrist was still swollen under the bandages, so we probably would have had to wait anyway.  The splint made it easy to deal with it over the weekend. 

So, today I took him to his appointment. 

From December 2010

Waiting for his cast...

He chose Red of course, it's his favorite color. 

I'm a little worried...the MD told us that the type of fracture he has typically doesn't heal very well or easily.  The fact that he's a child and his bones are still more flexible works in his favor, but he'll probably be in the cast for 6 weeks, and they want to see him and do X-rays every 2 weeks to make sure it's healing. 
At least it's not summer, when he would have to miss out on swimming. 

From December 2010

So, now both of my boys have broken their left arm, as did I when I was younger.  Hopefully we won't end up 3 for 3 in a couple of years ;)