Ear Troubles, or: Stitches, or: Earring Catastrophe

Welp, our only child (thus far) to need stitches has now got a second set. This accident was much worse than the first time, though, and necessitated a trip to the children's ER and concious sedation rather than being able to just stitch them up in the office.

This might sound a little kooky, but I think the COVID may have affected our sense of balance. I had the wicked earache and took a bad fall in the art room - which made it hard to distinguish sickness body aches from normal bodyache from my big dumb fall. James and Leah also took other big  tumbles and then Sunday morning, Leah had the bad accident. She was sitting on my legs and started to jump up and just went over sideways and her head hit the edge of the side table. When I got a look at it, I saw that her ear was just sliced open & knew she needed to go to the ER. Sam thought he should take her since I was in quarantine. 

Prepping for the procedure - you see they mollified her with PBS games on an iPad. 

Home & already feeling MUCH better!

She came home with a Disney princess dry erase board from the nurse for being so brave and 10 days of antibiotics. Spark was very, very interested in everything she did for the rest of the day. 

Which was mostly lying down. 

She played "puppet show" with Sam where she recreated the whole experience with the Hello Kitty paper dolls we got in the giant bag of craft supplies. When she got to go back to school, she started telling her teacher the whole thing, but Ms. Kristin convinced her to finish the story inside where it was warm. 

They put her hair up in an orange rubber band to get it out of the way and she also wore her hat all day, so her (very, very curly) hair got pretty matted. She let me wash it the next day, and this is what her ear looked like then - maybe a little swollen. 

And then this picture is 16 days out from The Incident, and it's still looking a little gnarly. She had a follow-up with the ENT who said everything looked good, and I think her hair will cover up the notch. 

And then there's James! He was roughhousing with Amelie one night while I was at work, and banged his ear in a way that pushed the stud into his earlobe. It swelled up something terrible (over the stud) so we thought we'd better take it out and let it heal. Poor guy only had his earring two weeks! I told him if it had been healed up better, like if the roughhousing had happened even a week later, it wouldn't have been any big deal. He might try again once it's healed.