head trauma

I've mentioned recently that Caleb is a climber. He also, as my mom noticed when she was here, has a bit of the devil in him. He is a tease who is determined to be into and onto everything around him. So it wasn't too surprising that I spent quite a bit of my early Monday morning pulling him down off of the rocking chair and attempting to distract him with something else only to find him seconds later back up dinking around on the rocking chair.

The fateful fall happened shortly after I'd taken him off yet again and carried him back to the bedroom to get him dressed. While I was getting his clothes out of the dresser, he zipped back out to the living room, climbed on the rocking chair, and then fell off. I didn't watch him fall, but I heard the thud and the cry that followed, so I went out to soothe him. I found him on the floor lying on his back, so I picked him up and carried him back to the bedroom with me. While I was still holding him, his eyes rolled to the back of his head and he passed out. (Oh my goodness -- that was such a horrible thing to witness!) Panicked, I shook him awake, but he kept losing consciousness, and it took all I had to keep him from continuing to pass out.

My mom, who was just a few hours away from needing to head to the airport for her flight home, told me to call 911, which I did. A few minutes later the paramedics arrived. Caleb by this point was starting to come out of it a little, but after the EMTs found out that he'd lost consciousness, we had no choice but to take a ride to the hospital in the ambulance. They put Caleb in a neck brace and strapped him to a papoose board so that he would be completely immobilized, then took him down to the ambulance waiting in front of the building. I rode in the back with him. (And yes, the lights and sirens were on.)

At the hospital a rather large trauma team quickly went to work on Caleb. They checked his vitals and got information from me, then wheeled him to radiology for a CT scan and x-ray. They had a hunch at this point that he'd be fine, but they wanted to be sure, especially since he was so young. He was then wheeled to a triage room in the Emergency Department and moved, still completely immobilized, to a crib for observation. I sat with him, sad that I could only hold his hands, but relieved that no one thus far had made me feel like a bad mother -- I was doing enough of that on my own.

Caleb slept for a while, but when he woke to find himself still strapped in the papoose and in that darn neck brace, he was mad -- oh so very, very mad. He wiggled out of that papoose and completely (and likely uncomfortably) disrupted the positioning of the neck brace. Eventually I was able to get someone to come help and they finally took him out of the restraints, which obviously weren't doing anything now anyway. I was told that the scans came back normal, and that as soon as Caleb had proved that he could keep food down, we'd be free to leave. We were released to go home (with our diagnosis of Level II head trauma) a couple hours later.

Meanwhile, my mom, bless her heart, took care of Garrett at home. She got him on the school bus and shortly thereafter got herself into a car service en route to the airport. She even straightened up my apartment, which in all the commotion from earlier that morning had been left a mess. I'm still a little sad that I couldn't give her a proper goodbye, but incredibly grateful that she was there and able to help. Blake came home early so he could get Garrett off the bus after school. He and I arrived home at about the same time; it was nice to have him around to help me recover from my own case of Level II trauma.

Caleb is back to his old self, and to look at him today, you'd hardly know how miserable he was earlier this week. We'll go back next week to the Trauma Clinic adjoining the ER for a follow-up appointment to make sure everything really is still fine. I'm surprised that we'd made it this long without a trip to the ER, but not surprised that it was Caleb who took us there. He has now been banned from all high places, but that hasn't stopped the climbing. So, no lessons learned apparently. And unfortunately.

Completely immobilized in the back of the ambulance.

With our very nice paramedic.

In the Emergency Department triage crib. At this point I think he was more traumatized from the treatment than from the fall.

My poor baby. This photo makes me want to cry.