Elbows and X-Rays

I always say that it’s more ‘when’ than ‘if’ we end up in the ER with one of the kids. Mostly I refer to Jack when I say this because, let’s face it, with the acrobatic stunts Jack pulls I think Evel Knievel might fall out of the family tree if you shake it hard enough.

Well we finally reached that ‘when’….well almost. We didn’t have to go to the ER, but we did take an unanticipated trip to the pediatricians and Jack got his first set of x-rays. What did he do, you ask? Well, that more of a what did “we” do.

Jack likes to climb up and stand behind me in the chair when I work at the computer (he’s there right now, begging to watch tractor videos on YouTube). When my patience with the little monkey ran out I went to give him a piggyback ride back out to the living room. He had his arms around my neck and I was holding his hands. As I stood he had his legs around my waist, but them dropped them so he was held up entirely by my hands holding his. That’s when I heard the ‘pop’. It’s a sound you never want to hear….it never means anything good.

I set him down immediately and he was holding his arm, crying, and asking for frozen vegetables. (We use a bag of frozen veggies as an icepack and Jack thinks EVERY boo boo needs frozen veggies. At the grocery store, if frozen veggies were on the list, you’ll often see him in the cart with a bag of stir fry mix clamped to his head….) So I put him on the couch with the veggies and checked over his arm. It wasn’t swelling and looked normal. He could move his fingers but cried when I moved his wrist. I gave him some pain medicine and decided to watch it for a couple of hours.

When Kevin came home from work Jack was up playing like normal, just not using his right arm at all. We tried all evening to ‘trick’ him into using the arm. He wouldn’t go for it. At bedtime we wrapped his wrist, gave him more Tylenol and decided to call the Dr. in the morning.

I called the Dr.’s office as soon as the opened and the earliest they could get him in was 5:30pm! How annoying is that? Poor kid had to go all day with a bum arm. On the plus side the Dr. we were scheduled to see was Dr. Moffit. We’d never been seen by him before, but his mother is the head caregiver at Emilie’s daycare. I’ve heard all sorts of stories about him from his Mom and she is such a wonderful woman, that I was excited to meet her son.

Well, Dr. Moffit was as nice as I’d hoped. He looked Jack over and said he was pretty sure Jack had nursemaid's elbow , but he wasn’t sure with the way he was favoring his wrist so he wanted to do some x-rays first to make sure nothing was broken.

Nursemaid’s Elbow aka Radial Head Subluxation

Jack did NOT like x-rays. He was NOT entertained by the little lead loin cloth that he had to wear (I thought it was pretty cute). He did NOT like having his sore arm held in odd positions for the pictures.

We after the x-rays came back and were deemed ‘normal’ Dr. Moffit did a elbow reduction on Jack. A simple pull-twist maneuver that took all of 10 seconds to do. Not five seconds after he was done Jack was using his arm again. By the time we walked out of the Dr.’s office you would never have known anything was wrong.