After living in ‘the city’ for more than three years, we have finally arrived at an important milestone: we made our first visit to the local Urgent Care. You’d think with five children (some of whom view gravity as more of a guideline than a law), we’d be racking up “frequent-wounder” miles.

Don’t get me wrong — we have not neglected our responsibility to patronize the local health-care establishments. Both Joshua and Daniel have spent time in the hospital for appendicitis; indeed, Daniel spent 7 full days in the hospital, racking up huge medical bills (hooray for medical insurance!). Even little Sarah started us off in this community with a scary emergency and hospital stay. For some reason, though, we’ve never brought our custom to the local Urgent Care branch.

Daniel was very brave, and hardly said more than ‘ouch’ during the whole process.

“We’ve had a bit of an injury,” Kathy told me. Her voice was guarded as she called me from the van, sounding as though she was pretty worried but didn’t want to scare me.

“Really? How bad? Who was hurt?” For some reason I live in fear of dental injuries — I imagined some child with broken teeth, gushing blood from the mouth.

“It is Daniel. He was crawling through the bushes and poked himself with some kind of stick; there’s something weird sticking out of the wound.”

It is nice to have our boy all patched up.

We agreed that she should finish driving home from the play date, and that I would take Daniel to Urgent Care if the wound merited such attention. Looking at it in the driveway, my heart sank — although not a large wound, it seemed to stretch open rather stubbornly. I didn’t think I could get it to close with a butterfly bandaid (assuming we could find one). Besides, what was that yellowish stuff poking out of the wound? Our insurance copay is $100 for an emergency room visit, but only $30 for an Urgent Care visit. Now that we’re on the budget, there’s no point in being all snooty — off to Urgent Care we went.

David came along for the fun, which turned out to be a bit of a mistake. Two hours later, they finally looked at Daniel’s leg.

“It’ll need stitches,” opined the nurse. She got out some supplies and we waited for the doctor to make his appearance. I must admit, I was worried. What kind of doctor works at this kind of clinic?

The problem with puncture wounds is that you’re never really sure how deep they are.

I guess I needn’t have worried. The doctor who finally stitched Daniel up was a kindly old gentleman with an excellent bedside manner. “That’s just subcutaneous fat,” he assured me, pointing at the extrusion in Daniel’s wound. He stuffed it all back in and applied 8 or 10 stitches with expert precision. We hobbled out to the car with a roll of surgical tape and some extra dressings, good value for our $30.

Tim
Project 366, Day 123

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