Rachel's fun week

It's a fun week when your daughter falls in tug of war and instead of letting go of the rope and bracing the fall as instinct would naturally cause us to do she she keeps a hold of the rope and nothing breaks her fall as her forehead connects with the lunch room floor. They rush her to the nurse and ice it and no bump appears so she goes back to class. A while later she has a bad headache so they call, give her Tylenol and ask me to pick her up. We watch her that night and she doesn't have much of an appetite and goes to bed with more meds for the headache. When she wakes up in the morning not only is the headache worse, she has some bad nausea, the room moved slower than her eyes could focus, everything was blurry. So I called the dr office and they sent me to the Children's Center Hospital's ER. So out we go and are rushed in past a kid who clearly needs stitches. We see a dr within minutes of being seen by the triage nurse. As much as I really don't want to spend hours and hours waiting to be seen there is something that really freaks me about about them wanting to see her so fast.

They watched her closely for a bit. They opted not to do a CT as they were afraid the radiation would actually make the problem worse than what it would tell them that they could get from watching her closely for a while. So we spent hours there with them watching her. The big scare here come to find out is that there was no goose egg on her head. Who knew that would be the concern. Basically, if there is a goose egg it's because the swelling is going out away from the head pushing the skin out. So when there isn't a goose egg there is possibly the same swelling but the direction it's pushing is into her brain instead of out away. They finally decided that it's not swelling any worse and told me the words every mom wants to hear...You just need to watch her until the symptoms go away unless they get worse then we'll need to see her again. Don't be alarmed if the symptoms last up to 10 days. Yes you heard me right. Ten days of no school, no play, no sanity for mom!!!

We survive a couple days. Take her into Dr 5 days later, when we finally were past the headache and nausea and other symptoms. I'm all set to take her back to school happy it only lasted 5 instead of 10 days. Then the ball drops again. No, she can't go back. Her pupils are not evenly dilated one isn't responding to light like it should. Checked other things and decided it was just another symptom to show her concussion was still hanging in there. So a few more days home recouping were in order. The next day the headache and nausea returned.

Finally 7 days after she was injured all symptoms were gone and we could send her back to school. So glad it wasn't 10 days and even happier that it wasn't worse. But at the same time I'm so glad those 7 days are over. It's going to take me 14 days to catch up from that.

The picture here is her at the hospital once they said we could go home. Her elephant she was given by her uncle charlie who went with her to help her be protected was sporting the blood pressure cuff. She had to stop and play a game of chess with me. That was too hard for her head...which was good cause I can never remember how to play exactly so we set up and played a game of checkers on a board so big we could be the players. It is a fun hospital I hope never to have to return to!