This fall my son, in his very first week of high school, did an end-o over the handle bars of his bike as he sped toward a soccer game and landed in the ER of Children's Hospital. I received a call from a good samaritan and met T in the emergency room. He was lying on the gurney, being a trooper and trying to be funny while in pain, with an immobilized arm and in -- a full-on neck/spine brace. Heart-stopping. Even though I realized it was likely precautionary, the next few hours spent on analyzing his vertebrae had me on pins and needles. When he was diagnosed with only a broken wrist, I was grateful to be low on the totem pole of catastrophes, and happily spent a long, long time waiting in that ER.
Fast forward four weeks, through all the processing of my son's angst about not being able to play freshman soccer after making the team, and not being able to engage two-handed in his beloved outlet: playing the drums. Through strategizing with teachers in a new school about the lack of his writing hand with a courseload of all honors classes. And through the fact that suddenly, my 9th grader was home unstructured in the afternoon far too often because I was working -- having already arranged my fall schedule to pick him up from soccer practice -- and soccer practice no longer existed. All of this is over and done with and we're fine.
Today, as we waited in the Children's Hospital cast room for our doctor to appear and check T's arm, I made friends with a little girl dressed in pink with a pacifier in her mouth, I'm guessing of 2 or 3 years old, lying next to me on a gurney. Her parents were very young too. She was on her back in a cast that covered one entire leg and half of the other leg and extended up to her waist -- a "spica" cast for a femur break I believe. This sort of cast has an opening so that a diaper can be deployed on the outside with some extra disposable padding within. The cast had been cut open for the impending check-up.
When the ortho visited her, they drew the curtain and the little girl screamed and screamed. Not because her leg hurt, but because her parents had failed to clean her up -- for how long I do not know. I could hear the doctor talking quietly but with urgency about how sitting in all that pee and poop had damaged her skin and that she wasn't screaming from the pain of her break as much pain from the "maceration" of her skin -- in other words, the pain of her neglect. It was obvious from the tension, and facial expressions of doctors and nurses that they were very upset. And I was very upset. The technician who was re-casting Todd's arm finally met my eyes with a long look that spoke silent volumes for both of us.
What do you do? What can anyone do with parents who are that young or ignorant or helpless or stressed or uncaring? What are their issues that they allowed this to happen to their daughter?
My old save-this-child teacher instinct was aflame. Someone -- please -- parachute in and teach these parents how to care for their little girl. File a CHINS, file a 51A. I'm sure the nurses and doctors were going to use the existing support systems as best they could. But what would be enough?
So instead of turning into a superhero who would swoop down and make everything perfect for this little girl, I took my well cared-for son home and have been staring at my bounty of resources all afternoon and being thankful. And freaked out. And sad.
