Tuesday, July 26, 2016

Iowa, Day One (a slight "bump" in the road)

Forgot to duck
We got to Iowa late Sunday night and after crashing at Grandma & Grandpa Z's house, we enjoyed a leisurely morning before heading out to the pond for some quality swimming and hanging out time with Kent, Leanna and a sundry of kids. Nora decided she was done swimming early, so she showered, changed and asked me to push her on the tree swing while Leanna hung with the rest of the kids at the pond, and Allen and Kent went on a keg run. It was lovely and Nora announced that she was having a lot of fun.

Which should have been the tip off that things were about to go horribly awry.

Shortly later, Grace and Owen joined us and I let the kids take turns swinging. Right about then, Kent's grandson, Daniel, announced that he wanted to go swimming in the deep end and since Leanna was hanging with Grant on the beach, needed a grownup. Thinking that a tree swing was a far safer spot to be unsupervised, I headed back to the pond with Daniel and was getting ready to take out the kayak with him when I heard a scream.

What actually happened is still somewhat murky. What we think transpired is that Grace was giving Owen an "under-dog" and Nora decided to follow behind, neglected to duck, and was hit with full force by Owen and the swing.

I ran over to see what happened and met Grace and Nora who was screaming in pain (Owen, oddly enough, continued to swing) and who's forehead had what appeared to be a tennis ball sticking out of it. We ran back to the cabin where, this being Iowa, I grabbed a bag of frozen corn for her head, texted Allen the situation, asked Leanna for her opinion of how bad this was, and called the Kaiser advice line.

While I was freaking out, Nora was calming down. As I spoke to the advice nurse Nora started interjecting and correcting me, and when asked about her pain level, she insisted it was a "5" or "6" even though I told her that it looked more like at least an "8" to me. Still, since it looked like she might have some bruising behind her ear (we couldn't tell with the light, and apparently it's a sign of a skull fracture), the advice nurse insisted we take Nora to the ER right around the time Allen and Kent arrived with the keg and Owen showed up (asking for a snack).

So Allen and I took Nora to Mercy Hospital's ER (which was coincidently a block from where Allen had picked up the beer) leaving Owen at the pond until Grandpa & Grandma Z could come get him. We were seen almost immediately (conveniently, Nora was already in the system from last year's bout of pneumonia), and while Kaiser had urged us to get a CAT scan, the administering physician said Nora didn't have a fracture or appear to have a concussion and that it wasn't worth the radiation to confirm. With that, they discharged us with nary a Tylenol for Nora to take, assuring us that she'd be fine though she'd probably look pretty rough for the next few weeks.

And that, my friends, is why there aren't a lot of pictures of Nora this trip. And why Owen might need to work on his empathy.

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