You can’t tell from these gorgeous blue eyes, but during our trip to Seattle we had our SECOND visit to the ER in one week! Joel was trying to ‘jump like a frog… backwards… off Gma’s coffee table’. Bad idea. It was around 7:30pm (bedtime). He was bored. His brother was busy drawing a StarWars picture book on said coffee table when ‘crash!’ Joel split the bottom of his chin open. Kent knew right away it needed stitching, and local urgent care places were full or closing up for the night.
We waited well over one hour to get a bracelet, another hour to get inside, and over another hour to get 7 stitches (around 11:30pm). Joel was a real trooper. He cried at the description of it, but not at all during the real procedure. My imagination always seems worse than the reality of the matter too. He was actually quite happy during the stitching. The young doctor said something like, “I would agree to have a kid tonight if I knew they would turn out this well-behaved!” Joel started humming him a song while he stitched.
While I have yet to see what this all will cost us, I was reminded a few times to be thankful. We had to wait so long because his injuries were so minor – that’s a good reason to wait! The doctor said he has a hard time getting impatient people to understand that someone else is having a heart attack next door. And someone else is having a stroke down the hall. In our case the kid who came in just before us was being transferred to a psychiatric unit for evaluation after breaking a window with his hands. I am thankful for our 7 stitches, and especially for the gift God gave us in such a happy boy: Joel.
P.S. We have since discussed that frogs DON’T jump backwards. =)
Joelie – ER: The Sequel by Kimberly is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International
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