We had an exciting night last night—and not the kind you want. Hannah and I did our normal nighttime routine, pjs, brush teeth, and read two books in bed with me and we both fell asleep. Kelly usually comes up a little bit later and takes Hannah back to her bed. At about 10 pm, Hannah who was asleep in the middle of the bed next to me, suddenly turned and pitched off the bed face first in an acrobatic move we can only imagine. She landed face first on the hardwood floor. I can’t remember how I got by her side, but I woke up pretty quickly and even saw her feet going over the side of the bed. Kelly came rushing upstairs to see what the commotion was, almost falling himself in his hurry and stocking feet. I lifted Hannah off the floor—she was crying instantly-- and I saw that both her lips were bleeding, right after that her nose started bleeding.
Kelly took her to the bathroom while I went to get ice. By the time I got back upstairs, it was clear that her nose was probably broken (it was swollen to twice its normal size and an odd shape). Kelly called the doctor, I tried to get ice on her nose (we were never successful with the ice or icepacks, though eventually we were able to put a wet wash cloth on her nose)—and held her while we waited for the on-call service at the doctor’s office to call us back. It seemed like an eternity, but it was only ten minutes, and they told us to take her to the ER.
Hannah did a good job of calming down (our brave little girl) as much as possible (as did I and Kelly—we both had our moments of needing to pull it together). She cried the whole time, but was not hysterical.
At the ER, the thing that she did not like the most was when they tried to take her pulse and oxygen with the little thing that goes on your finger. She did like the bracelet they put on her arm for identification (and didn’t want to take it off when we got home). After that, she did a good job of letting them look at her lips and throat and nose, and in her eyes to make sure she didn’t have concussion. We had the option for a CAT scan, but they said it would only be if we wanted to do cosmetic surgery in the future and wouldn’t change her care for the night—and it would expose her to a lot of radiation—so we opted out of the CAT scan.
They gave her Tylenol with codeine and Motrin to help her sleep and reduce the swelling. We got home a little after midnight. On the drive home, she was a bit loopy from the medication and talking and talking about all the strange things she was seeing driving home at midnight. She slept well. Both Kelly and I got up several times to check on her and I had nightmares all night about Hannah getting injured.
She woke up cheerful and ready to tell everyone the story of the adventure from the night before. She helped me get the blood out of her pjs with hydrogen peroxide this morning. The swelling has gone down but, I expect she’ll have two black eyes soon. We’ll see how her nose heals—the doctor at the ER said that we’d have to wait for the swelling to go down to determine if it was broken (he thought it would be three days or so). Little kids don’t have a lot of cartilage in their noses, so with luck, it’ll be fine.
We'll revise our bed time routine--even though I think this was a freak accident as she's never fallen out of bed before and mostly sleeps in one spot all night long--I don't want to take the chance of it happening again.
