Our First Child to Get Stitches is...

Felicity!!!

Just over a week ago we had the dreaded experience of having to run one of our children to the doctor due to and injury/accident. Amazingly, Bridget is 5 and has only suffered minor injuries. Felicity, on the other hand is the winner of the title "Our First Child to Get Stitches," and it only took her 21 months of life to do it. Honestly, with as much of a monkey as she is not to mention blatantly disobedient, I'm surprised it didn't happen sooner.

Last Friday, she was standing on a kitchen chair (like most little kids tend to do), and she leaned over the back a little too far causing the chair to topple over with her in it. Normally, this kind of accident would just scare a kid or give them a little bump. But in her case, she happened to hit the rung of another chair with her mouth. She screamed, and I ran over to discover her mouth full of blood which proceeded to get all over her, me, and the floor. Seriously, our kitchen looked like a murder scene.

I grabbed a dish towel and then ran to the couch to try to figure out where the blood was coming from and assess the injury. After a minute or two, I noticed a chunk of tissue missing from her bottom lip, a huge cut just under her bottom lip, and her front teeth were messed up.

Luckily, Nate was working from home that a day, but he had just started a conference call. Bridget ran downstairs to tell him Felicity was hurt, which he immediately dismissed as Bridget being overly dramatic, and then he sent her back upstairs. It was at this point that I realized how serious things were and that she needed medical attention ASAP. I honestly thought she'd bitten completely through her lip and broken off half of her front tooth. I told Bridget to go back down and tell him he needed to come upstairs now. Then he heard me freaking out, saying how bad it was, and that she needed stitches and promptly ended his phone call.

I should also mention at this point that we were in the middle of a huge snowstorm. It had been snowing constantly since the previous afternoon, and we had about 9-10 inches of new snow on top of the 9 inches we received a couple of weeks before that still hadn't melted. It was seriously like Snowmageddon outside. Our usual pediatrician is about 10 minutes away in good weather, so I told Nate to just run her to the clinic that's about 3 minutes from our house.

I'm so glad he was able to take her because I don't think I would have been able to restrain her the way he had to at the clinic. Thankfully, she had not bitten completely through her lip, but she did need 5 stitches just below her lip. The tissue missing on the inside of her lip would just have to heal on its own, and we also needed to get some dental x-rays done to try and determine the extent of the damage to her teeth. With the location of her laceration, they weren't able to apply a topical anesthetic, so they had to poke her with a needle 10-12 times to numb the area. And Nate got to hold her body down while a nurse held her head during all of that. Then he had to hold her again during the stitches.

Sitting in the exam room holding a rag to her mouth Nate brought from home. She preferred this to the gauze the nurse tried to have her hold. Poor little girl.

 

Sorry this one's kind of gross, but you can see the cut pretty well in it . It makes my mouth hurt just looking at it.

Then Nate ran her to our dentist which is only a minute from the clinic. Since she was pretty traumatized from everything up to this point, she didn't want to cooperate at the dentist either. They were able to get one x-ray. Basically, her tooth has a small chip and got pushed up a few millimeters into her gums, so it's a little loose. We're not sure what will happen at this point. It may move back down and firm up again. It may die, fall out, or become abscessed and need to be extracted. It's not a huge concern because it is just a baby tooth, but we'll just watch it and see what happens.

She had her stitches in for 7 days, and is healing very well. Nothing got infected. Her appetite didn't seem to be affected at all either. And thanks to how close the cut was to her pouty lower lip, it will hardly be noticeable in no time. Here she is proudly showing off how nicely she healed after getting her stitches out:

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This one shows the damage done to her teeth a little bit. Notice her front teeth aren't level at all.

Moral of the story: Do not let kids stand on kitchen chairs. Felicity's been really good about it since her accident, and if she does forget, she sits very quickly after we remind her. Let's hope that continues for a long time.