Stitches

Our morning started with Sandy cutting her finger on a tin can in the fridge. She got three stitches and she's doing fine now. Although, I can't seem to keep a band-aid on her finger. Any suggestions? I took her to pick out her own band-aids and we've already gone through most of the box. She's supposed to keep the stitches in for 10 days.

So...here's the story of what happened this morning. Sandy opened the fridge (we've been meaning to get a fridge lock, that's something we will definitely do this weekend!) and found a half-used can of spaghetti sauce that I had lazily stuck back in there with some plastic wrap. She pushed the lid down, and then tried to pull back and got her index finger got wedged between the can and the sharp lid. I pulled her finger out and stuck her hand under the kitchen faucet. It looked really deep and we decided she needed stitches so we headed up to Instacare. We got there right at 7 a.m. and I assumed they'd be open, but they don't open until 9 a.m.

So we called our pediatrician's office and had the on-call doctor paged. He said he could stitch it up when his office opened at 9. By the time we talked to the doctor, it was 7:30. Instacare and our pediatrician are in the same building so we decided to just hang out and wait. Bill needed some lab work done anyways and the lab opened at 8. The biggest challenge was keeping the bleeding under control - Sandy quickly lost patience with me holding a paper towel on her finger, but wrapping it in gauze never lasted long either although we tried it several times.

I cut my finger on a tin can when I was 10 or 11. The can cut into the tendon and it was a pretty big deal to stitch up and repair the tendon.


So I was worried that Sandy's finger would also need extra care and we might get sent up to Primary Children's Hospital. So I decided we'd just wait for breakfast since the hospital would want her to have an empty stomach if they were going to sedate her.

Instead, Dr. Allred agreed it definitely needed stitches, but was happy to stitch it up at his office and thinks her finger will heal well. So he had me hold her on my lap, used a needle to inject her finger with some sort of numbing fluid. She cried while he did it, but she did a great job of holding her hand still. Then he put three stitches in while she watched. She was really intrigued by what he was doing for the first two stitches and sat perfectly still and watched. By the last stitch she wanted to get down, but she still did really well.

On the way home, we stopped and picked up some breakfast.


I thought I was going to pass out by that point if I didn't get some food fast. So I guess we should have just eaten breakfast while we were waiting for the doctor's office to open. I'll do that next time.