Max met the sidewalk tonight, with his face, and we all met the local ER.
Matt and Max were playing outside and I was inside cleaning up stuff from supper, doing laundry, etc. I was about to go outside when I heard some screaming. I figured Max just didn't want to come in, but I stepped out into the garage to hear Matt say "Get a towel!". I realized that Max's face was covered in blood. Since it was coming from his mouth and we couldn't really tell what was bleeding, and the entire side of his face started to swell up almost immediately, we decided we should take him to the ER. There's one in the neighborhood right beside us so we headed over there. The lady at the front desk took one look at him and told us to go back to a room and got the nurse, then brought the paperwork. I thought that was great. The doctor was actually the first one to come in and look and said he wanted to get him some pain medicine first and then he'd take a look in his mouth after it kicked in and Max calmed down. The poor nurse had to pretty much get Max in a headlock to give him the pain medicine but it didn't take too long for it to start working. They came back a little bit later, and Max still wasn't too happy but the doctor was able to look and see that it was just his lip. He said he could do a stitch but it would probably be pretty traumatic (for all of us), and the way it's cut it looks like it will heal up fine by itself. So we decided against the stitches. Max will be on antibiotics for a few days to keep it from getting infected. He keeps saying "what's on my mouth?" His whole cheek and nose is scraped up and will definitely be bruised, and the doctor said it's possible that his nose is broken but it wasn't crooked so if it is broken they wouldn't do anything about it anyway. Max got a book from the nice nurse and a popsicle and movie when we got home. We learned 1) that we're glad that the ER is there and that it's nice, 2) our ER copay is $150 (ouch), 3) Tylenol with codeine does not make Max sleepy enough to go to bed easily, even after all that. Hopefully he's not in too much pain for long. It definitely made for an interesting night!
