Grace Takes A Trip to Urgent Care

Grace is fine, mostly, but here's the story.

We were having a wonderful dinner, and Grace had just finished. She'd been running around naked, to air out a bit, so she wasn't in her safety tested play pen where there's carpet, she was running about on the hardwoods (in case we needed easy cleanup). We suspect what happened next is her foot tried to get purchase on a CPR brochure that she had just tossed to the ground, and she slipped forward, her little mouth hit the corner of the coffee table on the way down, making a loud thud in the process.

Immediately, there was just a ton of blood in her mouth and around her mouth and flowing like water from a tap. It was hard to figure out exactly where it was coming from, but at least one spout was in the corner of her mouth. I picked Grace up and headed to the bathroom, as Betsey rushed past me to get supplies. In getting to the bathroom, I assessed that she had cut the corner of her mouth, and hopefully nothing else. I quickly found a clean pre-fold diaper in my hand, via Betsey, and applied pressure. Betsey attempted to look up the Urgent Care hours on the iPod, but Grace's screaming was rendering inoperable the human to iPod interface part of her brain. She put a diaper on Grace, I grabbed her clothes, and in two winks we headed to the Clinic.

We arrived at the Clinic to find urgent care still open (it was about 6:30). Betsey got out with Grace, and I parked the car. When I got into the clinic, I found the admission woman explaining that they don't usually take children under two, so she'd rather send us to a Good Sam urgent care, but first she wanted to call them and check that they would take us, since sometimes the insurance gets weird about taking Clinic patients without a reference. This seemed odd. Why would URGENT CARE care? It would have been infuriating if Grace wasn't being fairly delightful; Besides the occasional sobs, she was basically just trying to sign that she wanted the flower toy in the admission window.

Once they confirmed the other Urgent Care would take us, they asked if we knew where it was. We had assumed she meant the hospital about 100 meters down the road, but no she meant either the one in Albany or the one across town. She said we could go to the hospital, but it was way more expensive. We're guessing that's because instead of Urgent Care, they only have Emergency Care.

So we drove, and Grace, who usually only tolerates the car seat, was pretty vocal that on top of a serious gash, this was an insult.

At the Good Sam urgent care, things went much better. Admittance was quick since both Grace and Betsey were in the computer system already (Betsey labored and Grace was born at the Good Sam hospital that we had just driven from). Grace continued to be delightful and sob at the same time.

After about a minute of waiting, a nurse came for us. We huddled into the hall. We did the normal check-in things. I can tell you that Grace weighs 18.6 lbs. and stands about 27.75 inches tall. Her temperature was 97.6° F: A little cool from just being in a diaper in an air-conditioned car. Then we waited.

After about five minutes, the doctor came in. He was mostly concerned that she was not concussed, which we assured him she wasn't. He then took a look at Grace's mouth. Our main concern, because the cut was so big, was that she might need stitches. The cut starts on the inside of her mouth, near the corner and extends out in a very clean cut towards the nearest Commissure right up to the Upper Vermillion Border at that point.

medscape.com

He said it was a tough call. A cut that big on the inside, you leave alone. A cut that big on the outside, you stitch. A cut in a wriggly little girl's mouth that straddles the line between in and out, is a tough call. He went to get another doctor.

The other doctor came in and looked at Grace's cut. He stepped back and said the exact same thing. It's a tough call. The risk of Grace moving and causing further trauma during the procedure was basically too much. Additionally, Betsey pointed out, there would be essentially no way to keep her from picking the stitches.

So we asked a few remaining questions about cleaning, feeding, pain killer, and then we set off for home. We were home a little before 8, just in time for Grace's bed time. We gave her infant's ibuprofen, fed her, read to her, and put her down. She finally fell asleep around 10:30, after many many trips to her room, reassuring her that we loved her dearly.

Tomorrow, she'll go see her regular doctor to check for infection and to double check for any other damage that might have been missed. Also, we're ordering corner bumpers for the coffee table.

Good night.