She Really is Super Girl

Our little girl really is super girl and she proved it last night.  She is crazy tough.  So let me cut to the chase and say that her injury was pretty bad.  The need for stitches was obvious but even the doctor had not realized at first that it was so deep it would require both internal and external stitches.  My girl had been cut deep.  The coffee table/toy box had cut all the way to the bone.  What’s amazing is that the by the time I got home with the car she had stopped crying.  Blood all over the phone and table.  I felt like crying.  But my girl.  She’s tough.  I didn’t know fully how tough she was until Scott got home from their trip to the “boo boo doctor”and filled me in on the details of their visit. 

When they got to the office, they filled out the necessary paper work and waited in the room.   This is her as she happily entertained  herself with a bag of cheerios and our phone.  Seriously, if you didn’t look at the back of her head, I don’t think you’d know she was hurt.  (Scott took that picture too but I can’t look at it let alone post it for all the blood).  

The doctor examined and flushed her wound, then put some numbing stuff in their and bandaged it up.  Scott said she was really brave.  She just put her head down when they told her too and never moved or acted out throughout the process.  Even when it hurt. 

Then the doctor and nurses came back with this big blue board that they had to strap her into for the stitches.  Can you imagine?  It would have been completely reasonable for her to react to the unknown of the strange contraption.  If nothing else it was already well past her bed time and you know what that can mean.  But she didn’t.  Scott said she laid down like it was no big deal.  She kept flashing him smiles.  Later she told me about “the blue thing that was like a hot dog bun.”  The doctor thought at first he’d be able to close the wound with staples, it was at this point that he realized it would need internal stitches as well.  Poor girl. 

This is the part that my mommy brain and heart doesn’t like to dwell on. 

Scott said this took awhile.  The nurse and Dr. were prepped to restrain her head during the process but Scott had told her they were going to play the “still game” (apparently the rules were similar to the quiet game she plays in the car but you have to be still) and she did a really really good job being still.  For a long time she just laid there staring at Scott and smiling.  Scott assumed the gel they put in the wound must have removed the pain and so for a while he just smiled back.  But then, after about 10-15 minutes of probing around she started really grimacing.  She was clearly in a lot of pain but even still she wouldn’t move.  As a few silent tears flowed from her eyes and Scott was only able to hold her elbow and talk about fun things they had done that day.  Scott said to her, “Where’d your smiles go?  They were my Daddy medicine.”  To which she did her best to smile through a grimace.  As the doctor continued stitching her wound closed she never once screamed or fought it.  From now on I believe the cliché should be, “Take it like my little girl”

My almost 4 year old daughter is braver and tougher than me.  Hands down!  I knew she was tough, but this blew me away!  As I was tucking her into bed last night, 3 hours after her usual bedtime, I gave her a hug and told her that Daddy told me she was really brave and really good that night.  She looked at me with this sheepish grin and said, “He really said that?”  “Well, I did cry a little when I was in the blue thing.”  I assured her it didn’t mean she wasn’t brave.  She was a super star!  

The next morning I was asking her how she was to see if she needed some pain medicine.  She answered very matter of factly, “Well, it does hurt where I bleeded yesterday.”  I am fully convinced that my tough girl wouldn’t have told me unless I had asked.  Our little super girl never ceases to amaze me and I am so thankful to God that she wasn’t hurt even worse than she was.