Alyson's Disarming Adventure

The Queen of Love and Beauty is, sadly, a bit of a narcissist. And being a narcissist will only lead to tears in the end. On Friday night, at about eight, Aly was taking a bath, and decided she needed to see ALL of herself in the mirror. So she climbed out of the tub, shut the door, opened the drawers and climbed up onto the counter. And fell off. I knew something was wrong because I have never heard her cry out like that before. We had a scary moment trying to get into the bathroom because the open drawers were blocking the motion of the door.

When we finally got into the bathroom, she was lying flat on the floor, whimpering. I picked her up and set her on our bed. She immediately started crying "Please don't touch my arm, Please don't touch my arm!" I couldn't feel any breaks in the lower or upper arm, which scared me because that probably meant damage near or to a joint. After dressing her up in pajamas and one of Becky's shirts, we headed out to the Layton InstaCare to have her checked out. She screamed during the X-Rays, and kept begging us to make her arm the way it used to be. After looking at the films, the doc said "This is a bad type of break, and you need to take care of it now. The right humorous has broken right above the elbow. McKay Dee doesn't have a pediatric orthopedic surgeon, but Primary Children's does. I've called them and told them you are coming. Drive safely."

So we went home, got the cell phone, refueled the minivan, and drove down to Salt Lake. We checked into PCMC at about 10:45pm. So did every other kid in Salt Lake County. We were admitted quickly, but didn't get any more attention for two and a half more hours. All the time, poor Aly was crying "I'm thirsty, please give me a drink of waters (sic)." If you know Aly, you know that one of the side effects of her autism is her OCD. We couldn't distract her from this, until the X-Ray tech came out and said "I'm here to take some more pictures of your arm." Then Aly had something new to obsess about. It took a while to talk her off the ledge, but the rad tech was great, and calmed her down before taking pictures of her arm again.

Then we were put in another room, and things started happening a little more quickly. We saw a doc, then an ortho, then the ortho's boss. By now, after an IV insertion that was more painful to me than to Aly, the morphine finally calmed her down enough to fall asleep in Becky's arms. The ortho said "I called my boss, and we are going to have to take her to surgery to insert pins into her arm." This wasn't a surprise, since the emergency room doc in Layton had already said this was likely. From this point, it was just waiting. We got taken to third and final room, and Aly settled in to wait for her surgery. When the ortho was splinting her arm, she very politely said "Excuse me, Mr. Doctor. I am trying to watch a movie right now. Could you please move?"

Becky stayed with Aly, and I deserted to my mom's house to sack out from 5:00am to about 10:30. Justine let me in, but mom was already up getting ready for a hair appointment, and dad was up due to insomnia (Or maybe Sports Center was on).

Aly finally got into surgery about 11:00, and it went smoothly and quickly. She's got a splint right now, and gets a cast next week. She is pretty doped up now, but she still shows her personality through it. I was stupid enough to go to the Build-A-Bear at Gateway right after Disney on Ice let out, and ninety minutes later, I had a newly minted Rudolph-the-Red-Nosed-Reindeer under my arm. When I gave it to Aly at the hospital, I showed her how Rudy's nose lit up. She held up her thumb, which had medical telemetry attached to it, including a bright red LED. She said "Look Daddy! My thumb is so bright, you could even say it glows!"

Aly is doing as well as can be expected, but I am worried about school since she is right-handed. Poor Michal and Nathaniel didn't here the part where we said "We might be gone all night" and ended up staying UP all night. Talk about Night of the Living Dead. And I have nothing but admiration for the staff of PCMC. Though there were many long periods of waiting (due to the invasion of sick kids), every staff member was professional and just great with Alyson. The food brought to the rooms is amazingly good, too. Next time I have kidney stones (knock on wood), I want to go to Primary Children's.

In this case, I think that there weren't actually enough kids in the tub. If there had been, they would have ratted Aly out as soon as she climbed out of it.