Back in October, I got a call from the school office asking if I could come to school. Reed had been involved in a mishap on the playground. He and another boy had collided and his head was bleeding quite a bit. Luckily, Bob was still at home working, so I was able to leave the girls with him and rush to the school. When I walked into the office, two teachers were attending to him. Reed was white-faced but acting very bravely. In the time that it had taken me to get there, they finally stopped the bleeding. His shirt was covered in blood. What I hadn't realized was that he had been wearing a fleece jacket that was also blood-soaked, otherwise his shirt would have looked worse.
I took him straight to the Pediatrician's office. Of course, it was their lunch and they were having a conference. Luckily, after the receptionist saw him, she asked a few nurses to look at him and they said they could help us. Thankfully, no trip to the emergency room!
The doctor popped in to look at it. He couldn't see the cut because his matted, blood-soaked hair had dried over it. Two nurses cut away at the hair-blood mass for probably 20 minutes and probably spent another 10 minutes trying to get it shaved for the doctor to examine it.
Reed feeling a little squeamish; that's mommy's boy.
Whoop, there it is.
The cut turned out to be more of a puncture wound. The third grader that ran into Reed knocked his front tooth into Reed's head, cracking his tooth in half. Reed did not even end up needing stitches. They just super-glued the spot closed.
The other boy, a boy we know, didn't get off so easily. When I hurried into the office, everyone was huddle around Reed tending to him. I looked over at a table and saw the boy quietly sitting at a table by himself with his head down. Later, he went to the dentist for a partial root canal. He had to go back two more times in the coming days for more root canal treatment. He had cracked a permanent tooth that hadn't fully developed so the treatment was much trickier. It's amazing that boy took the whole thing in stride. Later, I found out from his mom that he was chasing a girl. I think I'll need to use that as a future warning to Reed to stay away from girls. ;)
We ended up so lucky. To top it all off, I didn't even faint.