Joshua Breaks His Arm

I worked Saturday and Sunday of last weekend, and my assignment was incredibly challenging. While it is an amazing blessing to be able to help care for the tiniest patients in the hospital, it also extremely difficult some days. Sunday was one of those days. At around 6pm, I saw a text pop up on my phone from Keith telling me to call him right now. As I was putting the finishing touches on my charting for the day, I called Keith to hear that he's planning on loading up the kids and coming up to the hospital to have Joshua seen in the ER. It took a few minutes to sort things out, but I got some wise advice from some of the more experienced moms/nurses and called Keith back with a plan to go to Night Lite Pediatrics, a walk-in after hours clinic. By the time we had a plan, it was going to be about 20 minutes or so until I got home, so in the end, I ended up being the one to take Joshua up to the clinic.

So why this urgent care visit?

Joshua decided he was going to try to ride Grandma's beach bike, and when he started to topple over, the bike was too tall for him and he couldn't put his feet down, so right down he went. I came home and checked him out and was pleased with the ace wrap that Grandma had put on him. When I took the wrap off, he had some localized swelling accompanied by quite a bit of pain holding his arm up off the pillow. So off we went to the clinic.
While we waited in the exam room, we made up all sorts of silly ways that he could have hurt his arm, including being attacked by the scary looking zebra on the wall. Notice that right arm - he was fine with bending the wrist, but the arm itself was bothering him.

After a series of 3 xrays, and some tears with the karate chop view, the physician came in to reveal that he indeed has a fractured right radius. The medical assistant was fantastic and was teasing Joshua that he was going to have to give him a pink splint.

The next morning, we went to the pediatric orthopedist to have the arm properly casted.
I can't say enough great things about the doctor that saw Joshua on Monday morning. The entire office was so nice and we were in and out without feeling rushed.

The doctor showed Joshua his xrays and Joshua thought he had shattered his hand. :) Then after looking a little closer, he saw the fracture line. He picked out a blue cast, and will have to wear it for the next 28 days.

Joshua's cool short-arm cast. He can still write and use that had.

The ortho doc's office is in the medical plaza of the hospital, and so since we were in the area, we stopped by to see Grandma's office in the hospital and she gave Joshua a smiley face on his cast.

We also stopped by to see the lego creations in the gift shop. This creation is mine. The hospital is having a contest to win tickets to Legoland. I couldn't get any of my peers to enter the contest with me, so I entered all by myself. I was given a tote of legos and had to only use what was in that tote to create something based on the mission, vision or values of our hospital. The square thing is a crib with a mobile and a baby - since I work in the NICU. I had no idea the hospital was full of such creative people, there were lots of great submissions for the contest. I don't know when the final numbers will be tallied to see who has won the Legoland tickets.