Joel's Broken Arm

I haven't written anything here forever, so here goes. . .

Joel broke his arm on Oct. 2nd. The boys were being loud in their room, so I eventually went upstairs to tell them to calm down. Joel was right outside of his bedroom door with tears running down his race. Instead of being straight from elbow to wrist, the lower half of his arm was split in the middle with the lower portion protruding away from the rest of the arm. Panic stricken when I saw it I immediately screamed, "KELLY!"

Of course this was a Sunday night, so we took Joel to the emergency room. It took them FOREVER and Joel had to have general anesthesia, but they finally got a cast on him.

While they were casting him they noticed that one of the bones had poked through the skin, so the doc told us he wanted Joel to stay in the hospital for 72 hours on an antibiotic drip.

We had arrived at the hospital at about 8 pm, but everything took so long that Joel and I didn't get to his room until 5 am.

When they x-rayed him the next day, the bones had "shortened" (overlapped each other), so the orthopedist that worked on Joel in the hospital wanted us to see a pediatric orthopedist. We did and to make a long story short Joel had to have two additional surgeries. One to reset the bones and put pins in and a final one to remove the pins. Of course the ped. orthopedist was in Annandale and one surgery was in Alexandria and another at Fairfax. All in all it was stressful, time consuming and expensive (because of our stupid insurance, but that's another story) not to mention painful for our sweet Joel. But we got through it and Joel had his final cast removed on December 9th. Needless to say I'm really crossing my fingers for no additional broken bones.

At his final surgery prep one of the nurses was working on Joel and he said, "You have really bad breath!" When an additional nurse came to help out Joel leaned in to take a whiff and declared, "Yep, halitosis." When they put a gas mask on to put him under, not liking the smell he reiterated, "Halitosis!"

By the way it really sucks to have your child put under anesthesia. There's always the fear that they won't come out of it, and that's bad enough. When Joel came to after his final surgery he was in pain, disoriented and scared. It took some time to calm him down and then he kept asking me when the pain would stop. I felt so awful that I didn't know and that I couldn't take the pain away from him.