You Must Have Been Dropped on Your Head as a Child

by Cathy

As she's done countless times before, Ari pitter-pattered her way down our hallway last night - no doubt, half asleep as always. Since I was still up, I headed her off at the foot of the bed, where she ended up bowed over, resting her tired head.

"Come on, honey. Let me take you back to your bed," I whispered as Joe snorted awake.
"What's going on?" he mumbled with one eye closed, arm stretched out in front of him as if searching for something.
"I got this," I said, as I ushered Ari's tired little body out the door and followed her down the hallway.

Upon entering her pitch black room, I heard her stop short and lay her head on the edge of the bed. 'Poor thing is sooooo tired,' I thought to myself.

I could barely see my hand in front of my face and couldn't gauge the distance from where she was laying to her pillow, so I just scooped up her legs and swung them onto the bed and put pushed hard to shift her up and onto her pillow. Apparently, she was MUCH closer to the pillow than I thought because the next thing I heard was a loud THUD. (It reminded me of those cartoons where the bad guy is using a tree log to bust down the door of the poor victim, except the log was Ari's head and the door was the headboard.) I froze. All I could hear was the headboard reverberating in the blackness. Oh my God, was that her head?!

She attempted to whimper on and off while I frantically whispered over her head: "Are you okay? Honey?! Is your head okay?! Are. You. OKAY?!?"

She wouldn't respond and this freaked me out because I didn't know if she was too tired or if I had knocked her out. So I sat there poking, pinching and nudging her while listening up close to see if she was breathing. With every poke, pinch and nudge, she shifted and with each of those shifts came a slight, tired whimper, followed at last, by a deep sigh. She was just too plain tired to acknowledge the pain resonating in her head. Sighing in practical unison with her, I sat there, my eyes now just adjusting to the darkness, and I thought about how scary it is that in just a millisecond, a serious injury could find your child. And what's more frightening? To know that it may be YOUR fault.


This happened to me once with each of my girls: With Bella, I neglected to strap her into her playswing and she fell hard on her tiny, still-forming head and with Ari, I let her 'cry it out' in the playpen when she managed in a fit of rage to break out of her baby prison and flipped over onto her head and the floor.

Of course I had to reference these episodes when my sister, a new mom, texted me at work the other day in classic new-worried-mom mode to tell me: "The baby just whacked her head really hard against my cheekbone while I was holding her and now she's crying. Do you think she'll be okay?" After I reminded her of my episodes, my sister replied with a relieved string of LOLs.

I was literally laughing out loud recalling the incidents now and my co-worker Marie had to come into my office and asked what party she was missing. I explained to her about my sister's worry and she too now had a baby-been-dropped-on-its-head story to share. "I was holding my son Nathan and he was about one at the time and we were at the park and he was throwing a fit," she began. "He got so fussy and fidgety, that he lunged forward and leaped right out of my arms and onto the cement pavement below."

I gasped. "What did you DO!?"

"I became hysterical, crying and screaming for someone to help me because I saw blood," she recalled with worry on her face. "Luckily, the blood was coming from his nose and nothing was broken. It was such a horrible experience. But he's okay now," she added with a laugh.

It occurred to me then that every mom out there has a freak-out story about their child that they can now easily share, but perhaps were not at all proud about at the time. In fact, my parents always tell me about the time I was in the baby walker when I was one year old, and my father left the front door to our apartment wide open as he went down three flights of stairs to retrieve the mail. I unknowingly waddled after him and cartwheeled my way down those flights of stairs while still in the baby walker.

I swear I still see a slight fracture in my skull from that incident. But it's okay, because you must have been dropped on your head as a child too. I'm SURE of it.

Hopalong Cassidy Joe

by Cathy

In the course of one week, my husband had the stomach flu, celebrated his birthday (while he had said flu) and nearly broke his ankle playing basketball.

Late on a Monday night, the back door creaks opens and in hops Joe with the help of two guys he plays basketball with (while I sat lounging in my robe and turban-like towel wrapped around my head, fresh out of the shower). He fell into an armchair, his face distorted with pain. I looked down at his right ankle. From mid-shin down, bulging out from the bandage below it, was a lump the size of a half grapefruit. His foot honestly looked like some kind of Elephant Man deformity. He was wincing in pain and trying to adjust the ghetto bag of ice the guys threw together at the gym: doubled up fruit market bags filled with ice that was now melting and leaking through at a rapid pace.

After a brief rundown of the accident and the tossing around of remedies to help him (apparently this has happened to one of these guys three times) they left. With the closing of the door, Joe's macho guard dropped like a dead weight. He let out a long, screaming moan, which he was obviously stifling since he fell. His ankle looked bright red and I swear it was pulsating. I set him up with a chair and pillows to elevate his foot, refilled the ice into a clean freezer-sized Ziploc bag and let him try to calm down. When the ice had numbed it over, we weighed the options of when to go to the ER and decided to wait until the morning.

A quick visit to the ER the next morning rendered his ankle surprisingly NOT BROKEN but he had a badly pulled outer ligament (high ankle sprain). The doc gave him crutches to get around and ordered him to rest, ice and elevate. He had to lay low and couldn't drive or even play basketball again until he got an okay from the doctor.

This sounded like a prison sentence to Joe, who is a MAN and has gargantuan PRIDE and is fiercely independent and generally doesn't do well when he is sick. His days consist of constant sitting and shifting and elevating and he complains frequently that his ass is constantly hurting and numbing up from all that sitting. The first day it was extremely painful for him to take his foot down from elevating it. I was busy working and going to parent/teacher conferences that day and couldn't get his pain meds filled until 8pm. "I NEED DRUGS!" was how I was greeted when I finally got home that night.

Getting used to the crutches is a whole other ballgame, as he fumbles with the awkwardness of getting it right and turning corners. The first day, while I was at work, he decided to hop around the kitchen on his left foot instead of using the crutches, when his left foot suddenly gave out and he fell, pretty much on his swollen, bruised, wrapped up, jacked up foot. Apparently he let out such a scream that it freaked out Ari and she began crying while Bella was trying to help him up. What a scenario.

I ran a bath for him that night and trying to figure out how to lower him in while still elevating his foot and not getting it wet. That alone was a mission of SWAT team proportions. You see, his foot needs to be not only elevated but iced cold pretty much the whole day, so inserting it into the scalding bath water that Joe prefers to bathe in would probably cause his clubfoot to explode, so it had to remain out - at least for that night.

It's been almost two weeks now and he's gotten the whole hopping/elevating/icing/stairs/crutches/bath routine down pat.  In the meantime, he's getting more frustrated at being cooped up and I've had to stifle numerous one-liners and other comedic references to his situation for two reasons: 1) his annoyance with my unwarranted comedic relief would feed his frustration, and 2) KARMA. I don't want that bitch coming back to hound me down.

Buuuuuuttttt.....the girls and I just can't resist. I've bit my tongue many times but as we hear him rickety-racketing his way down the hallway with the crutches or being greeted by his giant, rainbow colored foot elevated on pillows stacked up to the ceiling every time we enter a room, we can't stop ourselves. The remarks, which tumble out upon inception, have been too varied and too numerous to count - peg leg, clubfoot, old man Joe, Crutchety Kyle, Hopalong Cassidy, Hoppy Papi, My Left Foot, Shrek Foot...

All we're doing is trying to make this bearable for everyone, most of all Joe, right? Laughter is the best medicine, isn't it? I just hope that Karma, that bitch, is laughing right along with us on this one instead of taking notes.


Side note to readers: I would have posted a picture of his foot, but seriously, it's so ugly and so gross and so ugly...I will spare you.

Side note to Karma: The fact that I didn't post any nasty pictures of his foot, chalks up some good, non-Karma points in my favor, no?