Fourteen months without an ER visit was an accomplishment. Right??

On Wednesday night Paul had a business dinner to attend so Scarlett and I were planning to spend the evening together. Dave asked if I wanted to go to spin class with him and they happened to have an opening in the Kidz Club for Scarlett during the class time, so we decided to make a night of it. After a very tearful departure at the Kidz Club (mostly Scarlett, although I was getting pretty close as she tried to chase after me with extended arms), Dave and I had a great (sweaty) spin class and were ready for dinner. We picked Scarlett up and tried to go to Rock Bottom but it was too packed so we headed to the lesser Chevy’s. Not the most delicious option, but it was also in the mall and thus didn’t require going out into the cold or moving the car.

Scarlett was ready to rock as usual. The following day was the first anniversary of Dave’s cancer diagnosis, so we planned to have a quiet dinner and reflect on his crazy year. Scarlett had other plans. She really didn’t want to sit still at all, so I kept taking her out into the mall hallway to let her run while Dave sat inside at the table. He’s a patient man. Anyway, after 4 or 5 laps back and forth in the hallway, Scarlett started playing her games again. You know, the one we described before in which she asks me to hold her hand while she walks and then randomly goes limp in an attempt to get me to drag her through a public place. Well, this time, I’m not sure what happened exactly, but she immediately started crying. I got a knot in the pit of my stomach and knew something was wrong, but hoped that she just twisted something a little. It could have been that she just pulled down harder than usual or that I pulled up to keep her from hitting the floor, but regardless of how it happened, she was in pain. I picked her up and she immediately curled up into me in the fetal position. She usually tucks both arms under her belly against my chest when she does that, but this time, she was mainly tucking her right arm in and leaving her left arm hanging there.

I went back in to the restaurant and sat down next to Dave. Scarlett was crying pretty steadily at that point. I explained what happened as I tried to feel through her sweater dress to see if I could find any physical differences between her right and left arms. At that point I wasn’t sure whether it was her wrist, elbow, or shoulder. I finally decided that it was her elbow. I thought I felt some swelling compared to the right side and every time she tried to move that arm, she cried in pain. As I told Dave that I was going to take her to the emergency room, he recalled a story from his childhood in which his parents was overreacted about his shoulder getting popped out of joint and rushed him to the emergency room… He told me it was probably just pulled or strained. Uh huh. Even if that had been the case, I tried to politely pretend his story was going to make a difference in deciding my next move as I quietly planned my trip to the ER and asked him to try to reach Paul (my cell phone was in the car).

Within 5 or 10 minutes, she was crying consistently anymore. She was alternating between normal Scarlett (trying to feed me with her right hand, smiling) and crying in pain and nuzzling into my chest. She was holding her left arm tight into her belly but sort of limp. When she did happen to move that arm, she cried immediately. Dave noticed it too and not only agreed that my ER plan might be a good one after all, but offered to take us himself. I was willing to accept the possibility that I would be laughed out of the ER. Better to find out then that I was worried about nothing than to find out the next day that I should have done something that could have made her pain go away.

Off we went to Virginia Hospital Center’s ER. Well, that is after I left 2 voicemails for Paul and a text message telling him we were going there. Dave also decided to expand on my “We are in the ER” text message in a few others. Good for him. J I was not in the mindset to be too concerned with how Paul might react. I was focused on my baby being in pain! The ER was as great as an ER can be. They took us back immediately. As we sat down and I explained what happened, the nurse immediately said “nursemaid’s elblow.” Head slap. I vaguely remembered Leila telling me a story about taking Kazia to the ER for something called nursemaid’s elbow as a result of her and her brother swinging Kaz by the arms. I calmed down a little bit when I heard that because I remembered the cure being pretty easy and involving a doctor popping it back into place.

Scarlett was still pressed against me but I decided I better taker her dress off so we could see her arm. That was not a fun process. Then they needed to take her blood pressure. It was a tiny little thing that looked like a piece of tape with a glowing red light. Normal Scarlett would have thought it was cool. Injured Scarlett stopped breathing and did everything she could to make sure the man could NOT take her blood pressure. I kept assuring him that she was normally a very happy baby but his only remark was “in the last hospital I worked in, they separated adults from children and I never had to deal with this.” My guess is that he didn’t have any kids of his own. He finally guesstimated based on splitting the difference between a finger and a toe reading.

We waited for maybe 15 minutes for the doctor to come back to us. He too quickly said it was nursemaid’s elbow (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/000983.htm) also known as a partial dislocation. He said his own kids had it a couple of times. Within two minutes, he had popped it back into place (this involved him holding her elbow while bending her arm up, palm up and her crying hysterically in the process). He said he would send us to get an Xray done just to be safe but that by the time we got back, she’d probably be moving it around like normal. We again waited about 15 minutes before a nice nurse came to wheel us (yes, me lying in a hospital bed with Scarlett still curled up on my chest in the fetal position) to radiology. By the time we got there, she was already feeling better. She was smiling and laughing and playing games, although she still wasn’t moving her arm. Everything was great until they made me lay her down on the bed while I stood over her. She started bawling. Even though I was essentially still wrapped around her, she acted like I had left her alone in the middle of a field. Three pictures and positions later, she was back in my arms, smiling again and laughing as I sang silly songs to her. When we got back to the ER, Paul was there waiting for us, still in a suit.

Just as predicted, she was now clapping, shaking her arms above her head, and doing all of her “tricks.” She was in nothing but a diaper, happy as a clam. No one would ever have known that she and I had both been scared witless just an hour before. On our way out of the ER, she wanted to walk, so we put her down and held her hand. Immediately, she did the exact same thing that got her in there in the first place. Even one of the nurses said “Oh my God, she just did it!” and another nurse complained that he missed it but wanted to see what we were describing. Sigh. That’s our Scarlett.

A special shout out to Uncle Dave for again being my rock and bearing with me through the panic that was our first ER trip. We didn't get to give it the justice it deserved, but I couldn't be more thankful that we can CELEBRATE his first cancerversary. We love you!