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December 2014

How a Strand of Hair Landed Us in the ER

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Hair Tourniquet Syndrome is apparently a thing.  And Madison has first-hand (first-toe?) experience with it.  Here’s the somewhat ridiculous story.

I gave Madison a bath and as I pulled her out of the tub I noticed one of her toes looked red.  I dried her off, got her diaper on and inspected a little further.  I could see there was a piece of hair that had wound itself really tightly around her middle toe, like so:  5

I took her over to Dallas, and we started trying to pull off the offending hair.  At first there were strands hanging off so I tried to unwind them but before too long the strands had broken off and her toe was still in a tourniquet.  Uh oh.

We were at a loss as to how to proceed.  We Googled “how to remove a hair from a baby’s toe” and found out this kind of thing actually happens on a somewhat regular basis.  However, we weren’t given any good ideas as to how to remove the hair.  We tried tweezers.  We tried maneuvering a needle under the hair to rip it.  No luck.

By this time Madison was not a happy camper.  I called our pediatrician’s office.  Closed.  I called a nurse hotline.  The nurse said we should take Madison to the ER.  Right away.  I asked if we could try an urgent care clinic first and she said that would be fine.

So off we went.

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We got to the urgent care center.  The receptionist asked us why we were there.  Do you know how ridiculous it feels to go to the doctor for a strand of hair?  And then how ridiculous it feels to have to explain that to the receptionist…and then the nurse…and finally the doctor?

Answer:  It feels very ridiculous.  And one or more of the above persons will give you strange looks and shake their heads in disbelief.

The doctor took a look and tried to remove the hair a couple of different ways.  Madison protested.  At that point I think he realized this was actually a problem that would be a little trickier to resolve.

He put some numbing stuff on her toe.  Then the nurse and I held Madison down while he donned magnifying glasses and tiny, sharp tools and got to work.  After a few minutes he held up his hands in surrender and said, “I can’t get it.  You’ve got to go to the ER.”

!!!

He said her toe was getting swollen which makes it hard to get at the hair and the hair was buried in her skin so there was no good way for him to get under the hair to cut it off.

So, off to the ER we went.  Again, I have to explain to everyone why we’re there.  Again I felt like they were thinking, “Why are you here?  A hair?  A piece of hair?  Do you not realize this is the emergency room, keyword EMERGENCY?”

A nurse looked at it.  He tried to remove the hair.  Couldn’t.

A physician’s assistant came by.  He tried to remove the hair.  Couldn’t.

They both looked at each other, shrugged their shoulders, and said, “Huh.  We’ve got to get the doctor.”

The doctor came down with a flurry of people.   He took a look.  He tried to remove the hair.  Couldn’t.

While I wasn’t happy that this hair had been so stubborn to remove, it did make me feel vindicated that this stupid hair did actually need a real professional to remove and it wasn’t something we could have done ourselves.

The doctor then went through our options.

#1 – Knock Madison out and remove the hair.

#2 – Give her numbing shots in her toe and then cut the hair out with a scalpel.

#3 – Give her nothing to numb her toe and he would do his best to cut the hair out quickly with a scalpel.

The #1 option seemed a little extreme and the #3 option seemed a little barbaric so I opted for #2.

The doctor shot her toe up with numbing juice.  Madison screeeeeeeamed her little heart out.  Poor baby.  Then we had to wait a little while for her toe to get nice and numb.  During that time Madison fell asleep only to be woken up moments later for the torture to resume.

Three of us held her down while the doctor started slicing.  He made one incision on each side of her toe.  He called over to the people who were documenting the procedure and nonchalantly stated, “One incision on either side of the toe to the bone.”

TO THE BONE?!  Someone give me smelling salts, I’m about to faint.

The doctor saw my face and said, “Don’t worry.  The bone is right there.  It doesn’t take much to cut to the bone.”  If you say so, doc.  Still sounds gross.  And painful.

The doctor said he sliced both sides because he couldn’t see the hair embedded in her toe.  Cutting both sides of her toe would release the tourniquet and the hair either will (or did) fall off.

Then they bandaged her up as if they had cut her entire foot off:

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And then we were discharged.

I am still astonished that a piece of hair can get so tightly wound around one toe like that.  Madison is her usual happy self today.  Her toe looks better in that it’s no longer in a tourniquet but we can still see the line where the hair was and of course she has the cuts on the sides of her toe (to the bone).

At least she still has a toe, right?

And does this mean I should probably be vacuuming more often…?

A Creativity Conundrum

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I think I’ve mentioned once or twice (or in practically every blog post) that Brooke is pretty creative.  It’s one of our favorite things about her.  Here are some things she’s done lately that we’ve loved.

Someone introduced her to the game Twister.  It was so fun she had to come right home and make up her own version of the game:

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Here are more of her Play-Doh creations.  She designed dresses for her ponies and had a fashion show:

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Then she made a pony band.  Notice the blue winged pony on the left is the conductor.  The pink pony at the top of the picture is playing the maracas, the one below that is on drums, then there’s an orange pony on the piano and the purple pony on the bottom is playing a horn:

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Here’s another view.  Now you can see the frog singing in his microphone and the orange pony at the top on the guitar:

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Brooke was mighty proud of her maraca.  (I was impressed, too!  That thing was pretty detailed for only being an inch long!)

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Brooke drew a picture for Dallas which was really cute:

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She drew this at church:

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At first I couldn’t understand why the man was in a banana…until I realized it was a spotlight and the martian on the far left was actually the guy’s shadow.

The back of a school paper.  She said it was step-by-step instructions on how to draw a pencil:

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Spelling is not Brooke’s best subject, possibly because spelling a word creatively means you’re spelling it wrong.  (Once she spelt skunk “ccunc” and that looked like a completely legitimate word to her.  This is what we’re dealing with here.)  We are constantly working on spelling, and it’s not fun for either of us.  Finally, one week, things were looking good.  The stars were aligning, and it appeared she was going to get all her words right.  When we got the test back, I saw she had drawn this on the back:

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When asked about it she said, “It’s me clapping my hands because I knew I did great on the test!”  (The irony is not lost on me that she celebrated her correctly-spelled test by using misspelled words to congratulate herself.)

I had a pile of laundry to fold and had the brilliant idea to enlist Brooke’s help sorting the socks.  She’s old enough for that chore!  Why hadn’t I thought of this before?  Perhaps this is why.  Five minutes later no socks had been matched and instead Brooke had created a new member of the family – Snuffy:

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Like I said, we love Brooke’s creativity.  Life around here just wouldn’t be the same without it.  Our blog would have very little content without her antics.   I love to highlight Brooke’s creativity because I’m fascinated with the things she comes up with. I love her crazy ideas.  I could stop this blog post right here and you’d all go on your merry way thinking that Brooke’s creativity is always happiness and sunshine and smiles and laughs.

However.

I’ll be honest – at times Brooke’s creativity is also one of our least favorite things about her.  Her need to create and innovate is often frustrating and exhausting and is always messy and time consuming.  Take, for example, this:

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Looks cute and creative, right?  Well, I hate it.  When I see that picture I don’t see the kind of creative that I love.  I see Brooke sitting down to do homework and 30 minutes later exactly zero percent of her homework is done because she had the idea to make a Lego desk organizer which is still in the stage of “almost done” (which it’s been in for the past 25 minutes) which means I’ve already been nagging Brooke to death to get going on her work while she has been basically ignoring me, so after thirty minutes of doing (no) homework we are both ready to be done with each other for the night and that was only the pregame show folks because thirty minutes in we still haven’t even started doing any of the actual homework yet!

In fact, at the time, I refused to take a picture of that Lego thing, I was so irritated with it.

The only reason there is a picture is because the next day my mom came over and saw it and oohed and aahed over it and said, “You got a picture of this for your blog, right?”  So I caved and snapped a picture.  There you go, Mom.

Then we have parent teacher conferences.  I live in fear of parent teacher conferences because we never really know what side of Brooke the teachers are seeing at school and her creative side isn’t always 100% appropriate or appreciated.  Some assignments don’t call for creativity which is great for people like me who like doing tasks that don’t require a lot of brain energy, but we have Brooke who will not accept that all she needs to do is read a passage and answer questions and be done with it.  No.  She has to distract herself with the “GO ON” at the bottom of each page, notice that the two O’s look like eyeballs, and decide to make each one into a face:

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And really?  How could you not love that?  I love it.

However.

On the same assessment this is one of her answers:

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Perhaps you don’t need to be told that that was not the answer the teacher was looking for.

I am sure that Brooke’s creativity will serve her well in the end.  It’s just the getting-to-the-end part that I worry about.  I don’t want to stifle her creativity…unless I do want to stifle it so we can actually get some homework done.  I don’t want her to stop seeing faces in random places on her worksheets…unless I do want her to stop so she can finish her tests.  I don’t want her to stop making messes as she creates…unless I’m trying to keep the house clean.  I don’t want her to stop turning random, household items into other things…unless I ever want to get the laundry folded and put away.  It’s so hard to know how to encourage her to use her mind to think outside the box while still figuring out how to help her see there are certain situations where you just need to do what you’re told without coming up with your own spin on it.  It’s hard for me to know how to let her know I am delighted by the doodles on her school papers, but I’m also troubled that they’re even there in the first place because shouldn’t she have been focusing on answering the questions?  See?  Conundrum.

Someday Brooke will probably read this and I hope that when she does she has learned how to use this gift in wonderful ways. I’m sure she will.  If anyone can figure it out, it’s her, right?  I also hope she feels like Dallas and I were able to help her spread her creative wings appropriately.

We’re trying, Brooke.  Really.  We’re trying.

Pencil Drawings

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Caroline brought home this paper from school:

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…giving me flashbacks to this paper that Brooke brought home last year.  I’m surprised to see Caroline embellish her name.  I kind of love it.

She has also started drawing some…uh…interesting-looking people:

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Something about the huge eyeballs looking so severely to the side and the wide, toothy grins creeps me out just a little bit…but there again…I also kind of love it.

Kid artwork is pretty much the best.

Budding Artist

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The other day I went into the basement and saw someone had drawn people all over our whiteboard down there.  I couldn’t figure out who had done it since it didn’t look like the people Brooke or Caroline draw and Spencer doesn’t draw according to all I thought I knew about him.

I must have wondered aloud who the artist was because Spencer came up behind me and said he drew the people.  I didn’t believe him so I asked him to draw me some more while I watched.  Sure enough – he was the artist.

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Now he draws his little face-people everywhere:

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They’re pretty versatile.  He discovered if you give the guy just one eyeball he turns into Mike Wazowski:

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Add a nose and a stem and he was thrilled to create a portrait of his Halloween pumpkin:

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