Just Give Me ONE Week...

Could I just have one week where I'm not calling Urgent Care, the doctor's office, or my mother for semi-could-be-an-emergency situations? Tonight Sarah and Allison were playing quite nicely together in Sarah's room, then they moved to the living room. Sarah was all giggles and smiles throwing her bouncy ball (thank you Gramma and Grampa Seversike!) across the house while Allison laughed and chased her around. I was making a big delicious green salad (while simultaneously baking chocolate chip cookies) and experiencing one of those moments of 'life is good, REAL good' when I hear the panicked wail of Sarah. Oh it was a bad one. I walk it and see that a NAIL protruding out of some trim laying on the floor is lodged in her foot! YIIIIKES! My calm, cool collected Mommy voice and composure took over. I scooped her up, pulled the nail, took off the slipper and checked the damage. Sarah was screaming and sobbing. I rushed her to the fridge, got her favorite ice pack and asked her to watch Scooby Doo while I inspected it and promptly called Joel, my mother, and my sister. Sarah stopped crying within a minute - the girl's a trooper, I'd have milked it at least 10 minutes!

I make my calls and NOBODY is answering. I called my doctor's office and they were having phone problems...really?! Is this really happening? I finally called the actual hospital and they paged the on-call doctor. Meanwhile, I happened to go on Facebook to find my old college roommate who I know is a Physician's Assistant or somewhere close to that title. And by no coincidence I am sure of it, she was online. I messaged her and she looked up a few things and told me to clean it up and hang on while she checked on tetanus risks. While I was talking to her everyone and their mother (or my mother, really) called back. The doctor was one of those call backs and assured me that everything would probably work out okay as long as we kept it clean and watched for signs of infection. Tetanus was not a risk. My friend Alyssa pretty much said the same thing that my doctor said as I was talking to her online. Thank you Alyssa!

I plopped Sarah in the bathtub to help open up the puncture (which ended up looking fairly shallow, thank goodness). After her bath we had pigs in a blanket for dinner which I was glad for because who doesn't deserve a tasty, fattening, comfort meal after getting a nail in their foot? And just to show her appreciation for me, Sarah gave me THE funniest and most amazing compliment I think I've heard from her, ever:

"Mom, you make a MEAN dinner!"

Holy monkeys! (Her other famous line that I love) I am lucky to have such a brave and amazing girl.

PS The large unnecessary bandage was on her foot to keep the band aids on until I could find a larger gauze pad and some tape to put on. I could only imagine the screams coming from her room in the middle of the night because her band aids fell off - it's happened before, I am sure it will happen again.