A Run of Bad Luck

Well, Zoey hasn't had the best of days this week.  In the span of 24 hours she got an ouchy sunburn, feet full of splinters, and a big goose egg on her head.  I swear it's impossible for us to make it even one week without an injury in this house.

I feel bad because the sunburn was completely my fault.  I just totally forgot about sunscreen.  With the weather getting nice, we're outside pretty much all day long but it didn't seem overly bright or sunny that particular day.  Nevertheless she still got burned on her arms:

I was putting aloe on her arms that night when I noticed that she was holding her foot in a way that just looked funny.  I checked out the bottom of her feet and saw that she had 6 splinters:  2 larger ones and 4 small ones!  As I've mentioned, this girl does not like to wear shoes and was running around the deck barefoot.  If I felt bad that she got sunburned on my account, I felt even worse about this.  Not necessarily for getting the splinters, but because of the torture I inflicted on the attempted splinter extraction.  Apparently I'm really terrible at splinter removal.  Marty was holding her leg and I tried to dig one out with tweezers and a needle.  It was horribly unsuccessful.  All I managed to do was break the splinter in half and dig the other half in further.  But the worst part is that she screamed so hard that she actually burst the capillaries all around her eyes.  So now she has tiny red pinpoint spots on both eyelids and all around her eyes.  I tried to take a picture, but it didn't show up very well.  I'm actually ok with that, I don't know if I need visual documentation as a guilty reminder.  

I thought it was a bad day just with her getting a sunburn, splinters, and exploding capillaries in her face. Then I had rush home from working at PPI because Marty called to tell me that Zoey tripped while running and threw her face into the corner of the door frame.  He was pretty frantic on the telephone and all I could really hear was Zoey screaming at the top of her lungs so I came home to take a look at her.  She had a NASTY goose egg, it was about 8cm long and 4cm wide, protruding pretty far off her forehead.  It looked so ugly I actually considered taking her into the ED.  Assessing your own child's injuries can be tricky when you work in health care, the logical nurse-brain battles with the worried mommy-brain who agonizes over having a child in pain.  You worry about the worst case scenario, in this case a skull fracture or a brain bleed.  Although not likely from something like this since that part of the skull is very thick, we do sometimes see serious consequences from unlikely injuries.  But those are exceptions and not the rule and I was able to take a step back and look at the situation clinically as if she were my patient in the ED.  After I took a minute to think, I knew she was fine.  So we iced her forehead, gave her Tylenol, and tucked her in bed.  I was shocked how much better it looked the next day.  The swelling was basically gone and just had a little abrasion left in its place:

So I think we've had enough drama for one day.  If we don't get some injury-free time soon, I'm going to seriously consider investing in a helmet and a foam body suit.