Listen to this story: If you’re in the car, or cooking, or just lazy… you can listen to me read this story for you, in the audio file below.
Reading to my daughter in bed last week, while her older brother took a bath, we heard a terrible thud. My wife was out of town, our son alone in the tub. You hear a lot of bumps and bangs, cries and moans as a parent, and you soon learn to interpret them. As a savvy hunter might interpret bird calls. There’s good ones and bad ones, basically. This was a bad one. It sounded as if a grown man had fallen into the tub with him. From a height.
I put down the book to investigate. Sure enough my son was hunched over, knees in the water, facing its surface, dazed, one hand holding the edge of the tub, the other the back of his head.
“What happened?” I asked, reaching out a hand.
“I fell,” he mumbled through gritted teeth.
Then, as I helped him out, I saw the blood. Streaming down the back of his neck at first, then on his fingers as he asked, “Is it bleedi…” and looked for himself. Cue the screaming.
By the time I had grabbed a hand towel, his younger sister was standing in the bathroom doorway, fingers in ears, transfixed. Her wide eyes following the glistening trail of blood, as it coursed its way down his thin, naked body to his toes, and merged with a pool of water on the tiled floor.
Pressing the towel against the back of his head I asked, “How did it happen?” and prayed the bleeding would abate without a visit to the emergency room. Then he stopped wailing just long enough to respond, “I was trying to do something cool.”
I pressed a little harder and was encouraged by the lack of fresh blood, if it could close up enough to get through the night there’d be no need for stitches. No need to sit for hours in an emergency room, with a bloodied nine-year-old and his pajama-clad six-year-old sister.
The closest I’ve ever come to medical experience was during university, working in the kitchen of the hospital where my father practiced. But thanks to my own long, juvenile history of avoidable injury, cuts are somewhat of a specialty. As the youngest of three brothers, I was always the least able to “do something cool”, but also the most eager to keep up while they did.
From the time I could walk, until just twelve-years-old or so, I can remember the following injuries, all which required stitches: cutting my forehead on a stone step (then picking out the first set of stitches in my sleep); splitting the exact same spot against my grandparents’ coffee table (I still have a messy scar); falling face-first on an airport escalator, requiring it to be temporarily shut down while the cut under my eye was assessed; diving for a frisbee and splitting my top lip; being bitten in the face by a stranger’s dog; and almost losing my ear in a collision between my bike and the go-cart my brother was driving (thankfully a skilled plastic surgeon handled that one).
In truth, some of those catastrophes never fully lodged in my young memory, they were simply family legend, and I’m leaving out the broken bones and other bad cuts that were never stitched. I probably knew the term “steri-strip” before Band-Aid, and still wonder why they’re so hard to find on drugstore shelves. My mother (an overly-sympathetic nursing school dropout, who hated blood) used them countless times, to great effect. Holding me together just long enough to become my wife’s problem.
So as I held a towled bag of frozen corn to our son’s head last week and tried to calm him down from the obvious shock of slamming his head on the stone edge of the bathtub surround, I shocked myself by remaining calm. I Googled concussion symptoms, just to be sure, then ran through an amateur sporting sideline test of; math equations, day and date questions, followed by a phone flashlight pupil test that got everyone fascinated in the workings of the eye.
Lastly my daughter and I bandaged her brother up for the night, like a cartoon character who’s taken a mallet to the head, and settled him into bed.
That night I slept poorly and checked on him from time to time, relieved to hear that boyish snore still gently whistling each time I entered his room.
It was one of those horrific parenting episodes, that while you wish they didn’t happen, inevitably do, and you wouldn’t want anyone else to have been there. To be in your kid’s corner.
Because - as my mother too-intimately knows - parenting is a long, bloody, twelve rounds-or-more battle. And in this house, I’m the cut man. Pretty cool, I guess.
Loved this one Toby.