Last night was a bit more exciting than we wanted it to be. I was hanging curtain toppers in our family room while Brinley and Cohen played. Suddenly Brinley started crying and when I turned around to see what had happened, she was walking toward me, screaming, and as she opened her mouth, blood started pouring out. That was scary. I grabbed some paper towel, scooped her up, and rushed upstairs to the bathroom to clean her up and try to see what was wrong. Basically, she fell onto the corner of an ottoman and bit all the way through to the outside just above her chin. The outside looked like a regular screwdriver had pierced it but the inside was a much bigger and messier cut. Off to the emergency room we went. (Why does this kind of thing always have to happen to her? One of my life’s mysteries.)
She needed several stitches on the inside of her mouth and the outside puncture wound was glued shut. She handled the whole thing extremely well, impressing the nurse and doctor very much. For a kid who can be kind of a hypochondriac, she was a trooper.
As a father I now understand where my mother’s gray hairs came from. There were plenty of similar incidents in my family when I was growing up. One of them that stands out the most in my memory is when my brother, Dan, and I decided we would build a tree house down by the river near where we lived. We picked the biggest, tallest tree. Dan stayed on the ground gathering dead branches (!) to use for the floor while I climbed up the tree as high as I could go and made the floor with the branches Dan had gathered, lifting them up with a rope and pulley. After I had done this for a while I thought it might be time to test out the sturdiness of the floor I had made. I remember crawling out onto the floor and hearing a loud crack, then just blankness as I fell. My brother estimated afterward that I fell 30 ft. He said I hit the ground on my back and immediately bounced up as if I was a rubber ball or something. Fortunately I landed on a bit of dead wood branches and that probably saved me from broken bones or worse. I bounced up because among other things, I had had the wind knocked out of me and I couldn’t breathe. I remember being in a lot of pain.
Somehow we both got back to our house, about a mile away. I crawled up into my top bunk bed and just lay there groaning occasionally. I don’t remember if someone called my mother or if it was late afternoon and time for her to leave work anyway. But when she came home I promptly forgot my pain, or rather, it was overridden by fear from my mother’s wrath. Yes, she was extremely angry with me for what I had done. She made me take a bath — I could have been dying but I at least had to be clean before seeing a doctor! — and I remember her sitting in the bathroom telling me to scrub and get myself all clean. Then she took me to the nearest emergency room, about 20 miles away. I was extremely fortunate because I had no broken bones and no internal bleeding or anything like that. I think I had a bruised spleen and/or kidneys or something like that, but basically I was one big, walking bruise from head to foot, and I remember not being able to move much without pain for at least a few days.
Looking back on the incident, I realize just how lucky I was. I also realize that the source of my mother’s wrath was probably fear; fear that I was seriously hurt or fear of what might have been. Anyway, I was surprised to get an email from her this a.m. pointing to a blog post by a mother whose little girl fell a similar distance from a tree in her backyard and who was seriously injured. My mother said it reminded her of that long ago time that I have just described.