Lance and I were cleaning up after dinner when all the sudden we heard a clunk and then a hard cry come from Zuri. I saw her on the back side of the couch laying flat on her stomach. She and Rori had been calmly playing with dolls and I think she must have flipped over the couch somehow. Funny how with all the crazy playing the kids do in the house this happens when they are being calm. So Zuri, who is generally pretty tough, was pretty upset. The poor kid hadn't had an afternoon nap due to piano and baseball and now it was bedtime so it was hard to tell if she was actually hurt or just exhausted. She did point to her arm when we asked her where it hurt, but she was moving it some. So after a bath and some loving we put her to bed. I was nervous, but she went right to sleep and we didn't hear from her again until the normal time in the morning.
Unfortunately in the morning she wasn't moving it at all and when I had to move her arm to put her shirt on you could tell she was in a lot of pain. I called the pediatrician's office and talked to the nurse who said we needed to come in. Unfortunately the first time they could get us in was 10am so we continued on with our day taking Rori to school and running an errand. Zuri was in good spirits so long as I stayed clear of her arm. The pediatrician who was not the one we normally see examined her arm for a few minutes and announced that she was pretty sure the elbow was broken and that we would need to go get x-rays across the street.
I was feeling so bad for poor Zuri who was keeping her arm limp at her side and was not happy about everyone looking at her arm. I quickly scrambled to to make sure that Rori and Kai school pick-ups would be covered in case we were going to be at the doctors for awhile. Thankfully Lance was able to arrange it so he could pick them up. Good thing because we spent 1 1/2 hours at the x-ray place just waiting. They gave us a copy of the x-rays but wouldn't tell me how they looked. So, I'm sitting in the car looking at them trying to see if my medically un-trained eye can see anything while waiting for them to digitally send them back to the pediatrician. I called the pediatrician's office after a 1/2 hour and they still hadn't been sent over. Poor Zuri was exhausted at this point.
Finally I decide enough is enough and I drove back over to the pediatricians office with my copy of the x-rays and ask the front desk if they could just have the doctor look at them real quick. The doctor had said that if it was broken she'd try to get us in to the specialist that day, but if the specialist was full we'd have to go to the Emergency Room. This made me want to keep things moving as I really wanted to avoid the ER. Thankfully the pediatrician suddenly appears in the waiting room with the x-rays in hand and says she is surprised to say that it is NOT broken. I can't tell you what a happy surprise that was. She sent us on our way and just said to keep an eye on it. In the end we guess it was just a really bad sprain/ bruise.
By the next day the arm was swollen up pretty good and it was probably a good 5 days before she really started using it again. It was a tricky 5 days as we had to try and contain Zuri most of those days when we were out and about because if she fell (which as a toddler she tends to trip and fall a bunch) she wouldn't put her arm down to catch herself. Thankfully she didn't seem to generally be in pain unless someone was trying to make her use the arm. It was so sad watching her play with her one arm down stick straight at her side. Almost a week later the swelling had finally gone down enough for us to see how black and blue it was. Even now a few weeks later you can still see a little bruising, but she is back using it like nothing ever happened. We were crazy lucky and we are so super grateful. A toddler in a cast would have been no fun- especially now that the heat is starting to set in.
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