Yesterday I heard Eli "do-do-doing" in the kitchen, kind of singing a song and I happened to glance in there to see what he was doing exactly and there he was with a piece of pvc pipe (I use it to wind my yarn) and was pretending to play it like a flute. And he was holding it fairly correctly too. If I didn't think he'd move or clam up, I'd have gotten a pic, but it didn't last long. It was very cute while it lasted tho.
At some point in the evening on Tuesday we noticed that Eli wasn't using his right hand like normal. Geo was the one to pinpoint the cause of Eli's crying, not sure why I didn't catch it. I had tried to change his diaper and give him a snack thinking he needed changing or was hungry, but sure enough, his hand wasn't doing much, he wasn't wanting to use it. We didn't know what might have happened. I didn't think he could have fallen hard enough to hurt it and even if he did, it was odd that it was his right hand since he's apparently left-handed. So we gave him some Tylenol and hoped he'd feel better in the morning.
I wrapped it up in an Ace bandage to try to keep it still in case it was a sprain or something like that. Well, he did better on Wednesday, but still wasn't using the hand and was complaining if we touched his hand or fingers... so finally after lunch I got us ready and off to the ER we went. There weren't that many people there at that time of day so maybe was a good time to go. We got in to triage and then a room very quickly.
Once in the room we had to wait a little longer between being seen, but Eli had fun and entertained himself by peeking outside the door every time the automatic doors down the hall opened or closed; he also enjoyed playing peek-a-boo with the curtains and thought that was a riot. The lady who saw us was a nurse practitioner and couldn't have been nicer. She said from what I told her that she suspected "Nursemaid's Elbow" where the radius bone gets pulled away from the ulna and humerus enough so that one of the tendon's holding the bones in place can slip down behind the bone and gets pinched and hurts! Poor baby!
So she tried to pop it back in place (simple procedure), but it didn't want to go back in. After 2 or 3 tries of this she decided to rule out anything else going on (a fracture or anything like that) and ordered x-rays. Well, the x-rays, thankfully, came back normal so she tried the procedure again and this time she said, "ah! there it went, I felt the pop." So we just watched him for a few minutes, tried to get him to pick up stickers or keys or my cellphone... He finally was able to hand me my keys which was the most he'd used his hands since the day before. After that he did some baby signs with that hand and then it was a very steady and quick improvement till, by the time I got him to the car to buckle him in, he was pretty much back to normal.
Apparently, one of us had taken him by the forearm and pulled a little too hard, or maybe he fought/resisted us while we had him by the arm (could have been me, DH, or Geo for that matter; he's bad about fighting diaper changes so I'll have to be careful with that). So we had a family meeting and I told them that no one should pull him by the hand or try to pick him up that way... only picking up under both arms or by the upper arm. So, all in all, I'm glad it wasn't worse, glad he's back to normal, and glad we know what to do to make sure it doesn't happen again!
1 comment:
I just had a memory about this: one of our children got very sore under the arms because people were picking the child up so much! We had to try picking up at the waistline instead! That is one thing I don't think people are aware of anymore--that you can pull their arms out of joint or make them sore. Another thing is they have to hold an adult hand when walking and their arm can be awfully tired.
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