Weeknight Urgent Care and Santa Claus

There’s nothing like coming home from a mind-clearing run on the trail to a house full of bright red blood spots dotted all throughout it. Let me just say that everyone is OK here and doing fine, but it was not something I expected to see coming home and was immediately scared for what happened. I followed the trail of blood into our master shower where I found Brett washing Reece’s toes in the water. What in the world happened!?

Apparently, the kids were playing outside with no shoes on, and a metal rake was left in the neighbor’s yard under a pile of leaves. And Reece stepped on it! Ugh, there was a gut wrenching feeling of aching in the pit of my stomach watching him sit there with tears rolling down his face as Brett tried to clean the deep cut. Brett described the river of blood that poured down the drain not long before I arrived and I was so thankful he was the one who delivered the pressure needed to suppress the bleeding. We were just a little nervous about the cleaning job and didn’t want to cause Reece more pain, so we decided to take him to the Urgent Care for a look to make sure it heals up properly.

Of course, it was the same night that Santa Claus was supposed to make his rounds to the Winter Garden neighborhoods and the kids were so excited. There is nothing more heartbreaking than loading your kid in the car, while he is desperate to see Santa come flying down the street. We could hear the sirens on the distance, but didn’t know exactly when he was coming, so he was scared that at any minute he would come and Reece would miss the opportunity. But, we had to go before his wound started to close up on it’s own, locking in bits of metal or dirt or who knows!

So we spent the evening in the parking lot of the pediatric urgent care, with a box of popcorn chicken and a bag of Doritos, waiting for our call for our appointment. The doctors were amazing and cleaned out the wound really good before adding some antibiotic ointment and wrapping it up with gauze. Thankfully no stitches are needed, but they did inform us that the cut was deep and will take a while to heal, with applied pressure and frequent cleanings.

I had to pick up a prescription from the Walgreens nearby, but they needed 30 minutes to fill it. While I really didn’t want to go back out, I was informed by Brett that Santa was coming to our neighborhood at 8pm. I glanced down at the clock… it was 7:45pm. Perfect! I could get back home in time to drop Reece off to see his beloved Santa!

I successfully got Reece home in time and had a brief sit on the couch before loading back up in the car to get the prescription and some more of the self-adherent wrap.

And that was our Monday night. Gotta love the excitement of parenthood!