As a parent, it’s hard to take your child and drop them off for the first time at a friend’s birthday party. My daughter’s first party on her own was when she was in kindergarten. I wasn’t wanting to leave her at the party alone, but parents and siblings were not invited.
Three hours later, I was the first parent to show up to pick up my daughter. To my surprise, she was not at the house where I dropped her off. They had taken all the kids to a near by park. I was told that the kids were having so much fun, that they decided to stay at the park for another hour. I was asked to come back and pick her up in an hour.
When I came back an hour later, my daughter was more than ready to come home. The mom mentioned that my daughter had fallen down and had a ‘strawberry’ sore on her hip. As we left the house, her eyes began to water, and I asked her if everything was okay. She said no, that she had hurt her arm. As I tried to get her in the pickup truck, she began to cry. It just hurt too much. I tried to gently lift her in the truck and drove home as fast as I could. I knew something has terribly wrong. I stopped by the house long enough to tell my husband that I needed to take our kindergartener to the ER. We all jumped in the car and headed to the local hospital.
Arriving at the emergency room, they took us in right away. The doctor looked at her and ordered x-rays for her arm and chest. We quizzed her on what exactly happened for the twentieth time. She told us that she was running down a path. On that path, there was an arched wood bridge. As she was running up the bridge, she tripped over one of the boards. Because her hands were tucked deeply in the pockets, she could not get her hands out in time to catch herself, and fell hard on her left shoulder. We got her to laugh about how she had her hands stuck in her pockets and how funny it must have looked to see her trying to catch herself with her hands tucked way. The doctor outside the curtains heard us laughing and decided that our young girl must not be hurt too bad, so he went to lunch while we were sent down the hall to the x-ray room. As the technician started taking pictures of her arm and shoulder she began to treat our daughter like a ‘china doll’. It was apparent that she had a broken bone somewhere. Once the technician was finished, she escorted us back to our curtained room. We could smell the Chinese food that the doctor was eating close by. The technician left us and went to get the doctor right away. Soon he showed up to tell us that not only had she broken her arm, but she had broken her collarbone too. The collarbone was displaced, and our next step was to put her in a brace and get that bone lined up again. Little did any of us know that meant putting a brace on both shoulders, then the doctor put his knee in the middle of her back and tightened up that brace to pop that bone back into place. She cried, I cried, and even the nurse cried. Not only did they put this brace on, but she also had to wear a sling that was way too big for her. They could not cast her arm because the collar bone could not support the extra weight. Our little kindergartener looked pitiful.
The next morning, we all went to church. We put one of my button-up shirts on our daughter, so that we didn’t move that sore arm. The birthday party people were there and wanted to know what kind of joke we were trying to play on them. We explained that she had two broken bones. They felt horrible. Not only had she fallen, she had fallen with in the first five minutes of arriving at the park. They then confessed that this poor girl had sat on a bench the entire time and would not even eat a pop cycle. Not only did they not call us when she hurt herself, they made her sit there and extra hour, not playing. They kept insisting that she didn’t cry the entire time, so therefore she must not be hurt. I tried to explain that we understood that it was an accident. Our daughter is one little tough cookie!
One thing that we all learned that day was that different people react to pain differently. Some people seek attention when they are hurt, some people lash out, and others cover up their feeling, not letting anyone know how badly they are hurt. Just because people do not react the same way we would react, doesn’t mean that they are not hurting. The good news here is that even if we are running with our hands in our pockets and we fall flat on our face, we can pick ourselves up again. There are times when we need to get some help like our daughter needed, to put things back in place.
“Come to me all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest”
Matthew 11:28
