Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Palmer's First Cast


We're always excited to show off our childrens' "firsts"...first crawl, first word, first step. Well, how about their first real injury...like a broken tibia and fibula. At only 11 months old Palmer certainly beat me to my first cast. I think I was in middle school before I actually had anything casted. Luckily, P hasn't shown any annoyance at his new friend, it's not slowing him down from crawling all over the place, and he is only scheduled to wear it for three weeks.
We're not positive but we think it happened while he was sliding in Mel's lap down one of those big inflatable slides at "Pump It Up" here in Greenville. The only plausible explanation is that his foot got caught under Mel's leg as they went down the slide, b/c she says he started crying when they got to the bottom of the slide and pretty much didn't stop the rest of the time they were there. This all happened on Saturday morning (4/24). He was in a good bit of pain at times throughout the day on Saturday, but at that time we had no clue what the problem could be. We finally pinpointed to the area around his foot when we came up with our hypothesis about his foot getting caught during the slide. It wasn't bruised or ever swollen all that much so we figured he may have just sprained it. We gave him some infant Motrin which helped and decided to watch him throughout the weekend to see if it would get better.
It did, in fact, get better; although he couldn't support his weight on that leg when he tried to stand up and would topple over onto the floor. So, when that trend continued through Monday Mel set up a doc appointment for the following morning. Dr. Moll referred him to the hospital for x-rays whereupon we learned it was broken. I met them at the hospital (after having been at work for a whole 45 minutes) and a short time later I found myself holding him in the casting room having the kind of father-son bonding moment I didn't think I would be having this early on.
Good news is he should be better soon and that it was a very simple break that will heal up with no impact to his ankle joint. Let's just hope he doesn't manage to wiggle out of the cast during the next few weeks.

1 comment:

~allison~ said...

Poor little guy! He looks so grown up in the picture...such a trooper!