Trampolines & Broken Bones

Last Tuesday, when Jeff was out of town, the boys were in the backyard as I made dinner. When I looked out to check on them, only Owen was still there. I went to investigate & found Ethan & Kamden on the neighbors' trampoline with their boys, ages 5 & 11. I gave the boys 2 minutes to be home for dinner & went inside. Shortly after, Kamden came in holding his arm & sat on the couch. After he mentioned his arm hurting & explaining he'd fallen off the trampoline, I asked if he was ok & he said he thought so. I had him pick up his toys & when we sat down for dinner he said he could only eat the garlic bread & not the spaghetti because his arm hurt. I had him eat the spaghetti anyway (it was his right arm that hurt & he is left handed, so he could definitely still maneuver a fork). But when he got in the tub & I noticed how swollen his right arm was, I panicked a little bit. After talking to Kamden & calling Jeff, we decided to wait until the next morning to take him in for x-rays.

After the x-rays, they determined that it was fractured but the arm was too swollen & full of fluid to put a cast on. So they sent us home with his arm in a sling & an appointment with a specialist for Friday morning. When the specialist came in he said that we could decide if we wanted to go ahead & get a cast on. Then he said he could usually tell within 3 minutes of meeting a kid if they were one who would need the reinforcement of a cast...& that Kamden definitely fit that criteria. He even said he had a kid in the next room who had opted not to cast & now he was hurt worse than before. I would rather be safe than sorry & I knew that it was more than likely that the arm would endure another bump or two before it was fully healed, so we went for the cast. Which is a good thing because he has already fallen off his bike, a picnic table at my parents' house, & has even been back on the trampoline.

The fracture is near his elbow, but at the top of the arm, where it bends. Kamden was so frustrated when we left the doctor's office because he couldn't bend his arm & he told me he was going to go to school & cut the cast off with his scissors. We had a nice long talk about what would happen if he tried to remove the cast before the doctor said it was time, which is in 3 weeks. 

He has filled that cast up with signatures from family, neighbors, & friends at school. They were all done in a black permanent marker, then he discovered a shiny silver permanent marker at my parents' house & has traced over all of the signatures with that. He seems to have gotten over the fact that he can't bend his arm & it hasn't slowed him down a bit. Hopefully it'll be awhile before we have to deal with any more broken bones.