Of Chairs and Stitches

Plastic?  Really?  Plastic?!

My middle son came upstairs this evening leaking blood.  I'm not a "freak out" kind of mama when it comes to blood, especially from boys, but this blood was pouring down his leg and dripping onto the floor.  When I looked there was a 4-6 inch gash on his leg below the knee with no known cause.  I sat the patient in  chair and got all the gauze and the trauma pad and wrapped it while telling my son to apply pressure.  The other boys buzzed around like bees in the excitement sending up exclamations as the blood soaked through the dressing and dripped on the floor.  I went downstairs to try and discover what object might have caused the injury but saw nothing but a chair and bean bag they said the were jumping on.  The chair had been covered with a thick plastic which was now torn in various places by little boys sticking pencils in it during school time.  No, that couldn't be the cause. The gash was certainly deep enough to warrant stitches so I got a big sister to carry the injured party to the car while dishing up dinner to sustain the driver (me) and the injured party (him) before we left.  My youngest guy bid his brother a farewell and went crying into the house because he was sure the invalid was going to get his leg amputated because of the severity of the wound.

The hospital wheeled us right into an exam room and the hero courageously endured the painful shots to numb the area before they cleaned it and sewed him up, all while watching Tangled on the in room TV.  He was excited to be able to keep the cleaning syringe and face mask.  The gash ended up being only 2 1/2 inches long, but mommy measurements are often a bit larger than hospital measurements:)  The doctor asked how he got the cut and, as it turns out, it was the plastic on the chair.  It was like a giant deep paper cut.  He ended up with 10 stitches (the doctor said he could have gotten away with 7 but he was trying to beat a friend's record...shhhh don't tell) and home we came with all the limbs we left with.

What did we learn...torn plastic can be lethal at high speeds and that boys could probably injure themselves with a cotton ball under the right circumstances.