On Friday evening, JT was riding bikes on a trail with his friend M and M's mom. He had on sneakers and his helmet, he wasn't messing around, he just had a second of bad luck and his bike slid. His legs twisted and his left leg immediately bore the brunt of the fall.
An off-duty policeman and some park maintenance workers came immediately to the rescue with ice and a ride home for the boys and their bikes (3 cheers for Branchburg). By the time I got there, JT was in pretty good spirits but still refused to walk on his left leg.
Uh oh.
My boy is tough. So if he says something hurts, it's best to take that seriously. A few hours later the ER doc confirmed what I had already figured out. Broken tibia. A clean break, two-thirds of the way down from his knee, far from the growth plate. As broken legs go, this one can be fixed and made as good as new. And though JT didn't really complain, the doctor said that the pain was great enough to require some pain relief on an IV drip. So, with a silly grin on his face, he slipped in and out of sleep while they prepared his cast. At one point he announced that his beloved bike was "a nasty, rusted claptrap." I think that was the morphine talking.
It is a full-leg cast. No walking for the next two weeks, until we can see that the bone is growing back. He has crutches (which he calls crotches........yeah it's funny) and in a few days, he'll give those a try. Once bone begins to grow back, he'll get a walking cast. The doctor can't be entirely sure, but it looks like he'll be wearing a cast for the next ten weeks.
Have I mentioned that school starts on Thursday and I have a three-story house with the playroom at the very top of the house? I expect that this may be a bit of a challenge. I can carry him up and down the stairs and he's a trooper so I expect that soon enough we'll be laughing about this.
JT is already planning on how to incorporate his cast into his Halloween costume. Happily, being 7 means all sorts of positive thinking and that's a really awesome thing to behold.
5 comments:
Let me just say that today you deserve the Best Mama in the Whole Wide World award. Wow, your big kid is so lucky to have you... Here's to healing.
Rachel
What a trooper! Both of you, actually. Sending wishes for quick healing.
Kids are so durable! When my boy broke his arm the first time it took the day care three hours to ring me because he seemed fine, just a little quiet. The second time (same arm, and yeah, we were hoping the same doctor in the same ER knew children well enough not to call the police) he just sat there with a disappointed look and said, "it's broken".
I'm sure your boy gets his optimism from somewhere. . . ;-)
Ouch! Here's hoping for a speedy recovery. Give JT a hug from us.
Hope your little guy is hanging in there...and his mama too! I often think the big injuries/illnesses are harder on us mama's than they are on the kiddos. You having to carry him to the playroom for the next way too many weeks is proof of that I think!
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