Bill Roper's Journal

I would have posted this last night, but the LiveJournal DDoS attack was in full swing again then, so getting connected was not an option.

It was about 9:30 PM. I was sitting in my recliner chair watching the Cardinals play the Pirates, courtesy of a free trial of MLB Extra Innings. (I won't be getting it as I don't need another time sink.) daisy_knotwise had gone to the basement to swap out laundry.

And there was Julie who suddenly started crying her head off in the living room. Ok, what happened now?

I turned the corner, walked down the hall, and found blood. Lots of blood, because scalp wounds bleed a whole lot. Julie wasn't upset about the fact that she was bleeding. She was upset about the fact that two drops of her blood had fallen on a sheet of Elmo notebook paper that she was holding in her right hand.

*sigh*

I grabbed a handful of paper towels and held them against the wound on the back of her head and yelled for Gretchen to get back upstairs now. A brief discussion ensued as I told Gretchen she should put the car seat back in the car so that we could pack up the girls and head to the ER. (Why was the car seat not in the car? That's another story.) Gretchen justifiably noted that having Katie in the ER was not a good option, so she'd just take Julie and leave me with Katie.

And I pointed out that Gretchen had been having digestive problems all evening and "felt like crap", as she'd let me know earlier. So I would take Julie to the ER, tweaked knee or no tweaked knee.

So into the van with Julie, into the van with me, and off onto the road.

Where I was promptly stopped by a freight train. *sigh*

On the other hand, I did finally remember that the Cardinals games are back on KMOX radio out of St. Louis which is 50,000 watts of clear channel power at night, as opposed to the 5000 watt thing that they'd been on for the last couple of years that couldn't be heard clearly in the Metro East area, let alone Chicago. So I got to listen to the end of the baseball game while driving to the hospital.

It took about two hours before they moved us into a room. (I heard a rumor that a bunch of twenty to twenty-five year old tourists from New York had bought something from a head shop here and smoked it and were now busy consuming a great many ER resources. I have no idea if the rumor was true, but it was an excellent story.) Before that, Julie spent time playing with a balls-on-wire toy of a kind that we had once had, but had gotten rid of because the girls never played with it. And pulling books off the shelf and not reading them. And trying to make friends with the other folks in the ER. Julie, who is the shy one. Right.

But we got in the room and they took a good look at the head wound and put Julie in a gown. And we waited some more for the doctor. He was a really nice guy and really liked Julie, as did our nurse and pretty much everyone who ran into her.

So after about an hour and a half in the room, Julie finally fell asleep.

And then they put the staples in.

She barely noticed.

I took Julie home where Gretchen and Katie were waiting up for us.

And everyone went to bed.

Finally.