The Baranko Family: Claire's Accident

On Friday, April 20th Claire suffered a head trauma after falling off of a piece of older playground equipment at a nearby park. She landed on an exposed bolt holding down the equipment to the ground. Her head split open horribly and she had to have over 20 staples and 20 stitches to close up the wound on her forehead and scalp. Thankfully there was no bleeding in her brain and there doesn't seem to be any permanent damage, other than the scar she will have on her head.

She was such a brave girl in the ER when she was getting sewn up (by a plastic surgeon - we didn't make that potential mistake twice, we called the plastic surgeon consult!), but it was emotionally traumatic to say the least. They had her under mild anesthesia during the procedure, which is like "twilight" they say, but I could hear her crying out and moaning while they patched her up. Only one parent could be in the room at the time, and since I literally was on the verge of fainting after seeing the wound (I had to sit down and put my head between my knees) Matt was the better parent for that role. But man was it hard to hear her calling out for me and crying from the waiting room when I thought she was supposed to be under anesthesia! There was some bustling in and out and around the room by all the nurses and I didn't know why, so was worried something was going wrong. It tuned out that they were looking for the right tools for the plastic surgeon. It was a brand new hospital and they didn't have all their equipment dialed in yet. Poor little girl endured it all! We had to stay awhile after the procedure, waiting for the anesthesia to wear off, and then finally we were allowed to go home.

While the plastic surgeon, ER doctor and nurses were all wonderful, we had a pretty bad experience with the ER triage nurse. I rushed over from work to meet Isolene and Claire at the ER and ran in there and then after waiting for 15 minutes in the waiting room, the triage nurse took her vitals, but never actually looked at the wound under the towel I was holding. She sent me back out to the waiting room with a little girl with a head wound continuously trying to fall asleep and she never even saw the wound. There was exposed skull for goodness sake's!! This was not a small cut! Matt got there and he demanded we get in there and see someone. We finally got in there and they sent a young tech to come and "clean the wound". This was when we had been there for 45 minutes! She took one look at the wound and was like "Whoa! Has anybody seen this? I can't clean this!" Within moments she had gotten the ER doctor in there and he was ordering a CT scan. Thank goodness it was clear, but what if it hadn't been?! Yea, so we were not impressed with the ER in Northwestern Lake Forest Hospital, FYI.

Miraculously she didn't seem to be in that much acute pain. It hurt, but she seemed more concerned with how altered her appearance was because of all the swelling. Her eyes were almost swollen shut at one point in the healing process. She didn't recognize herself in the mirror and was scared of her own reflection. Matt put up paper in the bathroom so she wouldn't have to see her appearance and she drew "Claireb." on the paper. The healing went well, though, and all the swelling was normal. I slept in bed with her the first couple nights because she needed the comfort, but she didn't wake up because of the pain at all. We've know she has a high tolerance for physical pain ever since the time we took her to the doctor as a 6 mo old and they told us our smiling baby had double ear infections. (Now her tolerance to emotional injustice ("That's not fair!!!") is considerably lower.)

We kept her home from school for a week until the swelling went down and then we sent her back to preschool. Her classmates had all made her get well cards and were curious to see where she had gotten hurt. She did NOT want any attention about her head and was very upset when they circled around her on the playground at the start of school. She went into the fetal position and started crying, not wanting anybody to look at her. It broke my heart to hear about! Her classmates were not being unkind, they were just curious 4-5 year olds. In any case, after a little while the novelty died down and then everything was back to normal and she was glad to be back at school. We are heading into newer parenting territory where you force your child out of their comfort zone (she did NOT want to go back to school) even when they are hurt, because you know it will be better for them.

Matt called the park district of the town where it happened, Highland Park, and reported the accident and how it happened immediately. They came out the same day and met him at the park where it happened, and they secured mats over the exposed bolts within the day. That's all it would have taken to prevent this accident from happening to Claire.

So now we wait and see how her scar heals. It is on her forehead, but a big portion of it is in her scalp. We will have to see if she will ever get hair back where the scar is. I hope she doesn't suffer any long term emotional trauma from this or from dealing with a scar for the rest of her life. All you can say is - I'm sorry it happened, and I'm glad it wasn't worse.