Interesting day today.
Since the Hobbit’s facial accident yesterday pushed me so far off my schedule, I was up until 2 in the morning grading and …
Oh. Okay. Let me backtrack.
Interesting days yesterday and today. Since the Wife was teaching yesterday, I was in charge of watching and entertaining the wee bairn, which meant a planned excursion to the aquarium or park (it was like 70 degrees out, after all).
Alas, no excursion occurred, since as I was fussing around at the start of the morning — putting on shoes, checking email, etc. — the Hobbit was running rough circles around the living room laughing and crying out “Dizzy! Dizzy!” Now and again he’d stop to throw his Winnie the Pooh ball at my head — young fella has a good arm, I daresay — or to toss items off the couches and onto the floor, which added to the difficulty level of his spinning and laughing, I imagine. At any rate, on one of his laps he stumbled on a couch pillow — gosh, don’t you hate it when those just jump out of nowhere in front of you? — and fell face-first into the teak couch.
The thump was hard and hollow. And very, very loud. I leaped across the room, but even so the little guy was crying before I got to him. I picked him up, trying to calm him down, and my hand came away from his face slathered with blood that appeared to be pouring out of his eye.
I am not, for all my love of medieval weaponry, a great lover of blood. My own blood doesn’t bother me so much — I once operated on my own leg in my apartment, which was incredibly stupid but remarkably successful — but I tend to get queasy at the sight of it coming from someone else. So it’s strange to me, in retrospect, that I managed to stay so calm despite the blood gushing out of my son’s face.
I ran to the sink and started cleaning the wound area, trying to determine the actual shape of the problem while a part of my brain did some basic calculating on the fastest paths to the hospital and whether I should leave a note for the Wife or try to call her and … well, it turned out that the cut was only close to his eye. It was deep and gaping, but it was clean and his eye was unaffected. So I compressed it until the blood slowed to a creep, then started to worry about concussions. He had, after all, hit the teak quite hard.
His dilation was good, though, so in the end I only fretted about scarring, and thus whether or not stitches were needed. This was contemplated over repeated viewings of Baby Einstein videos, which calmed us both quite nicely.
After the Wife got home for her lunch break, we decided I should to take him to the doctor to find out about stitching to prevent scarring, since a far less significant wound near his other eye has left a scar. An appointment was made, and I took him in to get checked out.
The doctor advised against stitching, instead suggesting that we “glue” it shut. Hahaha, I laughed. Funny.
No, really, the doc said. And then off we went to stick the little guy’s face back together with what appeared to be superglue. The Hobbit was a champ through the whole procedure, hardly crying at all while folks held him down and put gauze over his eyes and squeezed gunk onto his poor torn face. Hopes are high that the scarring won’t be too bad.
Long story short, I lost quite a bit of work time yesterday due to the accident. So I was up until 2am trying to complete one stack of grading — another two stacks came in today, and I didn’t want three on my desk — and then had to fight to get to sleep with this lingering maybe-maybe-not proto-cold. Thus I didn’t get much sleep and sort of trudged through class. Not normally a problem, I don’t think, except that I had a surprise visit from an evaluator. Alas. I think it still went okay.
After class came a committee meeting that was plus plus not good fun. I survived.
But this afternoon has been great! The wee bairn gave me a wonderful, terrific hug when I got home, and the new computer was waiting for me, too. Then came an email from my first outside reader, who read my prologue to book 2 and apparently quite liked it.
Now if I could just rid myself of these meddlesome stacks of papers, all would be well!*
*Aside from the economy and the dissolution of order around the globe, I mean.
The superglue actually works quite well, Mike. Doctors glued the skin of my chin together a few years back when I landed squarely on it after slipping on a wet wooden walkway. Face wounds do bleed impressively. The spouse was washing blood off the front walk for at least half an hour.
I’m very glad to hear the hobbit did only minor damage to himself.
And I’m sure that outside reader’s judgement is keen and insightful, so do get on with things after all that paper-grading and virus-battling is behind you. 🙂
I’m glad Hobbit is okay and you didn’t faint. There must be something in the air. Cherie Priest also cracked her eyebrow open and had it glued back together this week.
Poor little Hobbit! I wish him a very speedy, and scar free, recovery!
It’s nice that docs are using superglue more these days. Superglue doesn’t bunch up the skin leaving an awkward scar like stitches tend to do. When I was about the Hobbit’s age, maybe a wee bit older, I slipped on a purse I was toting around and busted my chin open. I ended up getting my first set of stitches for it and it left scar which is still present today. I firmly believe had they just glued me back together like Humpty Dumpty there would have been no scar.
Thanks, y’all. Glad that the superglue thing isn’t as odd as it seemed to me at the time. The lad is in good spirits, I’m happy to say, and has returned to his dizzying ways.
Aye, Cathy. That, um, anonymous reader is quite brilliant indeed.