The Sunday before Thanksgiving (during which Jonah's brother Noah and his family was coming to visit... more on that later), we tromped up to a nearby forest to go on a family walk and gather some wild raspberries for one of the Thanksgiving recipes.
Happily walking along... until Elsie ran down a hill and tripped or a root and landed on her elbow. She cried a bit and whined a lot and Jonah thought she was being overly dramatic. But, Elsie actually has an incredibly high pain tolerance, so I suspected something serious, even though her arm wasn't swollen or disjointed. (Ana actually severely broke her left humerus in New Zealand when she was seven doing something similarly unexciting, but Ana's arm was three inches longer than it should've been, so we had a pretty good idea that it was the real deal.)
We gave it a night, and she was still incredibly sore the next day.
I should've taken her to Urgent Care, because the doctor's office couldn't get me in until 2 pm, and then it took 3.5 hours!!! to have the doctor say that it wasn't broken enough for a cast, but not inoclulous enough to just leave it alone. So, after 3.5 hours of us sitting and waiting, they put on a soft cast/splint and told us to come back in a week for another x-ray. So efficient.
Elsie was pretty bummed about the soft cast while her cousin was here, but we did cheat a couple times and let her take off the soft cast to shower and maybe we even let her get in the hot tub....
In any case, here we are a week later for the follow up visit. After TWO hours with the pediatrician again, we were sent down the street to the orthopedic surgeon. At this point, we NEEDED ice cream sandwiches because I was fairly irate.
The orthopedic surgeon said she had the slightest of slight fractures along the bottom right side of her humerus and that she'd probably be fine with a soft cast/splint for another 3-4 weeks, but why not just do a hard cast for two weeks to be sure the healing was a done deal? It seemed like good medical "practice" to me, so here she is with her new blue cast (to match her school uniform).
Actually, the main reason I thought it would be okay to get a hard cast is because she doesn't seem like the type that will ever have a bad enough injury for another cast... so I thought it would be a novel experience in the least. Plus, she only had to have it for two weeks, so I figured that was just enough time for her to enjoy the extra attention without the cast getting stinky and itchy.
Elsie didn't complain once about her cast, and she only hit Camden once on purpose with it. She was pretty cute with the cast, I have to say.
On the final day before she got it off, I did a hack paint job. It's supposed to be a candy cane. She didn't mind the sloppiness... she loved it and so did all the kids at school!
But, I was glad to finally have it off and to not have anymore unnecessarily long doctor's appointments to look forward to. Whew. That's enough injuries for now, thank you (oh wait, I spoke too soon... more on that later...)
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