Those of you that know us, know that we had a very large and agonizing bump in our road last week.  We’ve been doing our best to paddle like crazy our way through it since then.  Thankfully we seem to be over the worst of it {knock on wood} and we are trying to figure out life with our “new normal.”

If you’ve been reading this blog for long, you know that I write about what I’m experiencing in my life… This is one of those things that is demanding to be written.  I want to express somehow the journey of these past few days we’ve somehow managed to survive.

Thursday night we got home from school and work without drama.  I heated up some leftover meatballs for dinner while the wild man Wade played outside on the trampoline. At one point, I saw the crazy dude had dragged the plastic slide up ON the trampoline and was standing on top of the slide, balancing Karate Kid style.

A few minutes later he had moved on to a new feat.  He had pushed the slide over to the trampoline opening and was sitting at the top of it seeming to contemplate whether sliding out of the trampoline and ONTO THE GROUND was a good idea. Of course, he decided it was, and whoosh down he went.

Without incident.

Chris decided to go out for a few minutes and jump with him before the two of them came into eat. Davis had finished chowing down but Haylee and I were still finishing up when I heard some screams from the backyard.

Honestly… I didn’t even get up.

By the time you’re on your third kid, you somehow become more immune.  I didn’t even get up when Chris brought him inside and said he had gotten hurt.  I thought we were just dealing with a normal run of the mill injury.

Chris lay him on the living room rug to survey the damage while I mosied in from the kitchen like the real mom of the year.

He and Wade were jumping together and Chris jumped down while Wade was in the air.  Then when Chris came up, the trampoline bounced back up hard and hit Wade as he was coming down.  The craziest part is that is Wade wasn’t even pulling some sort of wild stunt.  He was jumping on the trampoline the right way… with adult supervision even.

Chris pulled off Wade’s shorts, and we discovered a nice big sort of HUMP on the top of his left thigh. It didn’t look good. It wasn’t long before we decided it did look like a possible break, and we needed to make a run to the ER.

We are blessed having our friends as neighbors {as in… they were our friends BEFORE even moving in two doors down} so I called Sam and hurriedly asked if he could watch Haylee and Davis until Nana & Pop could get there. I then called Billy & Robin and he and Nana headed over while we rushed around getting ready to go.

We headed off to the local ER and had an excruciating drive with every little bump providing much pain for our crazy man.

I dropped off Chris and Wade at the ER and went to park the van while Chris checked him in. Thankfully, they pushed us the front of the line and we sat down to wait.

When they called us back they had to examine the leg to determine if he should go to Express Care for minor issues or the main ER for major ones.

They went ahead and sent us to Xrays and we had another round of agony trying to get him to let us position his leg which was permanently bent at the knee to get accurate angles of the break. All while wearing a lead apron that refused to stay on.

A doctor came in shortly thereafter and announced that we had a femur fracture.  All of the ramifications of that simple sentence would slowly become apparent to us as the night went on as we tried to process everything that was happening.  Needless to say we were extremely naive walking into that ER. We expected to be back to work and school on Friday!

We had to possibly transfer to another bigger hospital, but in the meantime we were looking at an IV to administer pain meds and sedation so they could put on a temporary splint.

Dealing with hospital time and a 4 year old in PAIN is no easy thing. About a light year later, they finally came and put in the dreaded IV. To a panicked and thrashing Wade trying desperately to turn his head and see what they were doing.

Once it was in, they wheeled him out to a bigger procedure type room and gave him the sedative.  That was probably the hardest thing to see.  It didn’t knock him out completely so he just stared off into space and moaned occasionally.  There wasn’t any life in his eyes at all and Chris even said it almost looked like he was just paralyzed or something.

After the splint was on we had to wait for him to wake up and also for another set of xrays.

About another millllion years later, the ambulance had arrived and we were ready to transfer to a nearby Children’s hospital. Chris rode in the ambulance with Wade, and I ran home for a few things and found my way on my own.

Once I met up with them again at the Children’s Hospital, Wade was in much better spirits from the pain killers and feeling calmer and contentedly watching TV. We knew we were facing either surgery with an incision to put in pins or a plate… OR getting a big old body cast to wear for 6 weeks.  Either way, he would be headed to the Operating Room to be put under.

A few Orthopedic Residents came in and dropped the bomb that his leg would need to be resplinted since the other hospital had only splinted it up to his hip right above where the break was. According to them that was making it almost worse because of the stress on the muscles or something like that.

Bombshell #2 was that there would be NO sedation to resplint it and again they acted as though the previous hospital had somehow not done things as they would. According to them, sedation to splint a broken femur is not normal…or “atypical” in I’m-a-doctor-so-I-use-big-impressive-words lingo.

About four of us spread around Wade, and we made him levitate while a fifth person wrapped his leg and chest in a new splint. All the while, my poor determined son was screaming at them to stop touching him. I will say that fifth dude was fast… crazy fast, so it was done in no time.

From there we headed up for our THIRD set of X-rays, though these were thankfully the least traumatic. I could see the X-rays he was taking and was surprised to see that his bones were not only broken but they were now sort of overlapping, which I was pretty sure was. not. good.

We finally reached our tiny closet, er… room for the night around 2 am Friday morning.  The hospital was full and had admitted 4 or 5 kids from the ER that night so we were stuck staying in a recovery room. There were two small, hard chairs against a window that looked like it would be our beds for the night.

Not exactly what we had planned for the evening just a few hours earlier.

This crazy drama turned into 2,000+ words, so stay tuned for the rest of the story on how our tough little man survived this traumatic ordeal later this week.  It has definitely been an interesting few days for us all.  We are so thankful for God’s grace and strength as well as all the prayers and words of encouragement from so many of our friends and family.

We are all hanging in there.  :)