Paul left on a Monday night for a week-long fishing trip to Alaska. My mom arrived on Tuesday to help us out and we had to pick her up from the airport around noon. This messed up our schedule, so Beck didn't take a nap that day. It's about 6:30 p.m. and I'm getting the bath ready for the boys. I've got Nolan undressed, down to his diaper, and the bath is ready. I tell Nolan "the bath is ready...go get Beck!" So he heads downstairs. I'm right behind him, but I missed seeing how he started to fall. I see him falling from about the second stair down and he sort of flips over (and I think he rolled over his arm) and lands on the landing. He's crying pretty hard and I scoop him up to assess the damage.
While I was preparing the bath and Nolan was falling, Beck was outside and had found a stick. He brought it inside and was swinging it around, so my mom is trying to get him to take it back outside. He FLIPS THE FLIP OUT. Remember, no nap, so he's exhausted.
So, Nolan is still crying pretty hard, Beck is throwing a serious tantrum, I'm trying to figure out if Nolan is injured or just scared, my mom is trying to calm everybody down, and it's pretty much mass chaos. I immediately suspected that Nolan hurt his arm because he wasn't calming down and he wasn't really using his left arm. I decide pretty quickly that I need to take him to urgent care, but I try to call the after-hours doctor on call to run it by him/her first. I'm waiting to get a call back and decide I'm just going to get in the car and go. Beck is HYSTERICAL and I basically just have to leave him in my mom's care and hope that she can calm him down. (I see him run out of the house as I'm driving away. My mom tried to get him in the bath, but he refused and he finally just asked to go to bed. She put his jammies on and he passed out immediately.)
A nurse or someone calls when I'm driving to urgent care, Nolan is still crying, and I'm just trying to stay calm. We arrive at urgent care and Nolan has finally calmed down, but he occasionally starts crying again. We talk to the P.A. and she orders x-rays (she didn't really think anything was broken, but, you know...just in case). We wait and wait and wait, they give Nolan some ibuprofen, we do the x-rays (see previous post re: haircuts and you can imagine how fun holding him down for x-rays was), we wait some more, and Nolan seems fine. He's playing. I'm having him wave his arms around and he's moving them both like crazy. I think "I am totally overreacting. He's fine!" Just as I finish that thought, the P.A. comes in and says he broke his arm in two places.
So, they put a sling on and give me instructions to make an appointment with the orthopedist. He chose a purple ("purpur") cast. He broke both bones, but they were very minor buckle fractures and he only had to wear the cast for 3 weeks. It didn't bother him at all (except maybe at night...he woke up a lot while he had the cast on, but that could have been due to his molars coming in), but bathing him was quite a challenge. The cast came off last week and he's good as new!
