I’m posting this because I need to ‘vent’ it a bit and we really can’t talk about it to family here for a number of reasons. We have a wonderful little 7.5 month old, he’s the sweetest little guy, but last Saturday we had a hell of an accident and I’m feeling pretty depressed about it even though everything’s ok now and it was absolutely not anybody’s fault, but hey, this is the “pub” right, so it’s a good place to talk I guess.
Anyway a friend brought over some used baby clothes last Friday but apparently didn’t check to make sure they were 100% clean, and long story short, a big-ass (6cm) sewing needle was in there and happened to fall on Corby’s play carpet. I was outside working on my deck extension and so I didn’t hear him screaming, but apparently he had wiggled his way onto the needle and it was poking into his skin, causing him to be not so happy. My wife goes to check on him but doesn’t know what’s going on, and doesn’t see the needle until it’s almost completely in his back. She tries to get it out but can’t, and runs outside to get me. She told me later that she wasn’t sure about getting me because she didn’t want to ‘spoil my alone time.’ We’ve since had a long talk about priorities. Anyway, by the time I get there, the needle is wayyy in there, starting to go perpendicular to his back, and the end of the needle is pushing his skin up like a tent, which seems very, very bad to me. So I take the sharpest knife I can find and cut a little bit of skin so the needle can pop out again and take some of the pressure off. The surgeon told me later that that was probably the thing that kept all this from becoming a much sadder story.
Anyway, I tell the wife to call an ambulance, and I’m sitting there holding him while he’s still sobbing, and the lady on the other end says 'have you tried taking the needle out?" I try pulling just a bit but it’s stuck fast, and I tell her it’s not coming out. She says, ‘Get in the car and drive to the hospital.’ My wife explains that we can’t do that, it’s sticking out of his back. Finally I say “tell her to send a f—ing ambulance” and my wife says, “can you please send an ambulance, my husband is getting upset with me.” So they send an ambulance. Paramedics show up, load us into the ambulance, and drive us over to the hospital. Head pediatrician comes in to take a look and tries to pull the thing out, then thinks better of it and orders an x-ray to see what the damage is. Radiology was interesting - the radiologist looked like quasi-freaking-moto, hunchback, limp and everything. That was not encouraging. But they got it done, and the results looked good, so they called the head surgeon to come down and pull it out. He has a pair of what look like disinfected vise-grips and he just pulls it right out. There’s a tiny little dot where it was sticking out and that’s it. He gives us a prescription for antibiotics and tells us to keep the bandage on for 48 hours, and that’s it. Little corby was quite a brave guy, he was crying most of the time but right after that needle came out and he sat up, he was all smiles and laughing again. That made me feel better.
As I said everything’s ok now, but given some of my family history this was a pretty stressful event and I just needed to get it out there to get it off of my mind. I was also quite happy to be living where we do, because out of all of this we only had to pay $10 for the prescription, everything else was free. When we got home I had a homebrew. Oof.
