This one’s for the scrapbook

Tonight was our first official trip to the E.R.

Today was pretty much like any other day – Peanut went to daycare, I found out I have a sinus infection, we all came home, ate dinner and settled into our evening routine.  Jon was cleaning up the kitchen while Peanut and I walked to her room (oh, she walks now) and started playing before bath and bed.  I climbed into the rocking chair while Peanut picked up one of her toys and was walking around with it.  She neared the chair, lost her balance and smacked her head into one of the wooden part of the chair.

I looked down and she started to cry – this isn’t anything new since she has been falling a lot since she started walking.  But she looked real odd for some reason so I jumped off the chair and lifted her as she started really wailing.  The rest happened in approximately 15 seconds total:  Peanut stopped making a sound while crying, Jon ran over and grabbed her while I started to panic.  She stopped breathing, turned blue in her lips and slowly in her face and passed out.

Jon kept walking her up and down while I started to think about CPR.  I put her on the couch and covered her nose and mouth with mine and gave her a few puffs of air.  She woke up and started crying- the best sound I could have ever imagined.  Jon and I put the dog in the crate, grabbed the keys and ran out the door to the emergency room.

On the ride over, Peanut was a little out of it, going between looking like she might pass out again and crying.  At the E.R. they ushered us right into a room, checked her oxygen levels, eyes, reflexes, and talked me off a ledge.  The doctor suggested a cat-scan, but Jon and I called our pediatrician to make sure they agreed since babies don’t usually get scans because of the radiation.  After letting the E.R. doctor talk to our doctor, everyone decided to just observe her for another hour, but forego the cat-scan.

The first 15 minutes were pretty bad – it was past her bedtime, she didn’t have her bottle, and we were among a whole bunch of new sounds and lights.  Peanut cried and cried, while Jon and I tried to calm down from the event that led us into the room in the first place.  After settling down, Jon went to the car and got our portable DVD player while the nurse brought Peanut a pacifier.

After that, things were going much better!  The doctor told us we’d need to hang out for about an hour so Jon went home (we live 10 minutes away) and grabbed Peanut a bottle, some pjs, and our pacifier.

Within a few minutes, she was back to her old self, crawling around the bed and giggling.

We tried to find some humor in the fact that our kid would probably be the first one to take a dive off the bed – but at least we were already in the emergency room!

(I didn’t really laugh either).

By 8:45pm the doctor came back, looked at our squirming little Peanut, and told us we were safe to go home.  After talking through the incident a few times, we all determined that she most likely passed out from crying too hard and being unable to breath in.

Our instructions are to wake Peanut a couple of times in the middle of the night to make sure that she’s breathing and stuff, which basically means that I’m not going to sleep tonight.

And thus completes our first trip to the E.R.

“Hey, mom, I went to the E.R. and all I got was this bruise on my eye.”