The weekend started for me at 0200 Saturday morning as I hopped in a vehicle and headed to the Tuscon Airport for my flight back to Fort Hood. After landing in Dallas, I get a phone call from my mom, who’d been watching the girls for me while I had my TDY trip.
This phone call involved my youngest falling from the top bunk onto the hardwood floor. Then she threw up. So mom, being the awesome Grammy that she is, was taking her to the ER, oldest daughter in tow. I spent the entire flight from Dallas to Killeen researching head injuries and willing the plane to land. As I’m leaving the airport, I get the word that they’re doing a ct scan.
This is not good. An hour after I get to the hospital, they’re call in in the airlift and we’re airborne, being life flitted to Dell Childrens Hospital in Austin. Two days later, we’re still here, my youngest in a neck brace (which my older calls her cat collar) and me in the same clothes I flew out of Tuscon with Friday night.
You want to talk about mommy guilt? How about when I left the girls with my mom in 2007, I nearly canceled out of officer candidate school because Mia had a fever and Mom had to take her to the ER to get it down. While deployed in 2009, my youngest once more sent me into a panic by having to be rushed to the ER for splitting her thumb open. In early 2010, right after we both got home from Iraq, we were back again for a broken arm. And now this: a fractured skull.
So we’re sitting in Dell Children’s (which is AMAZING) while my back to normal except for the broken bones in her skull four year old argues with nurses, begs for cookies and all the way around continues to scare the daylights out of me.
The decision to stay in the military has never been an easy one but weekends like this, when I’m not home and bad accidents happen, make me consider all things differently. I won’t try to say I stayed all a calm and collected on the flight down. I fell apart. Completely. And then adrenaline kicked in and I had to make decisions. Yes, allow the ct scan. Yes, give her the anti nausea meds. And worst of all, if I couldn’t get on the flight with her, take my four year old to an Austin hospital without me because they might have had to operate. What do i email my husband? Do I say call home asap or do I give him detail so he has information (turns out, he’d rather have the call home asap with no details).
All this happened on two hours of sleep and a whole lot of adrenaline. I’m happy to say that she’s doing fine. She just called room service and asked for more bacon. She’s been hogging the iPad and watching How To Train Your Dragon for the eighteenth time (luckily, I love that movie, so it hasn’t been a sacrifice).
Shes been hospitalized 5 times since she was born and this is her fourth broken bone (a thumb, two bones in her wobbly arm, and now her skull). Hopefully we’ll head home today but you know, I’d rather keep her in the hospital.
Just to keep her getting into anything else before her head is fully healed.
