well, at least it happened towards the end of summer...
 

Friday I was finally getting some writing done at work, and had just walked back into my office with lunch in hand. My cell phone rings and the ex says, "camp just called and Calvin broke his arm." My office is on the 6th floor facing west in Marina del Rey, and his camp for the week is at the UCLA Marine Aquatic Center, which happens to be due west of me, about a half mile away. While I'm on the phone with her, right on cue, I see a fire truck with lights on making the turn off Lincoln (the main street) onto Fiji towards the MAC. I drop lunch, head down the elevator and quickly drive the half mile to the MAC.

I pull up and sure enough there is the fire truck along with paramedic unit. Sitting on the bench is the boy getting an orange vacuum splint applied to his right arm. He's pretty freaked out, but dad's here so everything will be marginally OK. I hop in the back of the ambulance with him strapped to the gurney and we ride to UCLA Westwood hospital.

They wheel us into triage and I'm taken aback a bit by the traffic - people on gurneys parked everywhere. After about 20 minutes the triage nurse checks him out and we get dropped into an exam room. Very nice nurses and docs coming through to get him checked out, then x-rayed, then back to the room. He fell while running playing capture the flag (putting his hand down to break his fall - classic injury) and I though it was his wrist but once they took the splint off I saw the somewhat boomerang shape of his lower arm and figured it was a double break of radius and ulna. They developed the films and I asked to see them - sure enough, both cracked and one bent back.

His mom showed up at the ER and we all hung out. She doesn't like docs or hospitals and gets squeamish but luckily I don't mind and am pretty curious about everything, knowing just enough premed topics to be dangerous. We soon get moved from the exam room to another hallway and that's where we spend the next 6 hours - in the hallway. Next to us is a young kid with a urinary tract infections (gave him a script for Keflex and sent him home) and a guy in his 80's with Parkinson's, cancer, and in for bad bed sores along with his wife (not very patient) and his daughter (very nice). Amazing the stories and lives you see hanging out in the hallway of an ER. Like the woman who got wheeled into one of the trauma rooms to be seen by the residents. The attending doc had seen her multiple times over the past few years, removing various pens, paper clips and other sharp objects she had jabbed into her abdomen. Then there was the guy who had a neurological exam, got tired of waiting on the gurney in the hallway (despite him being brought lunch) and finally removed his IV himself and walked out following a heated phone conversation with someone (friend? family?) who didn't want to come pick him up from the hospital.

Anyway, back to Calvin. They determined that they needed to reduce the fracture, and the boy is a wimp when it comes to pain (more mom genes). By contrast, I broke my wrist in a floor hockey game in college early in the first half. I finished playing the game and then when to the ER to get xrays. There was no way they were going to be able to do it with him conscious, and he asked to be knocked out. They gave him ketamine, which is a freaky drug - eyes are open and they are "awake" but their conscious mind is disconnected from the body. They put him "under", manipulated the arm and put the splint on. Checked with xrays afterwards and looks like they got it right. He has to go to ortho next week for them to check the early healing and then get the "real "cast.

I have to commend the staff - they were all great. It was a long 8 hours of mostly standing in the hallway trying to keep son and mom from freaking out. The hospital is excellent but is too small, and evidently they built it that way. There are no beds, and for people admitted there currently is a 1-2 day wait for a room. Crazy. At least the Santa Monica hospital (run by UCLA) actually has beds (learned this listening to the doc talk to the patient next to us in the hall).

Stuff happens. Hug your kids, and be happy that things aren't worse (please no parf-ish healthcare rants).

http://nostatic.com/photos/chospital2.jpg

http://nostatic.com/photos/chospital1.jpg

Glad the boy is ok.

With all that apparatus it looks like he's about to get a heart transplant!

That is "Trauma 2" - one of the serious rooms. They didn't have any serious cases at the moment and it is setup to deal with patient monitoring and x-ray. This is a level 1 trauma center so they get the serious stuff. I think they are second only to County-USC in volume/severity. While we were there a woman was brought into Trauma 1 (the neighboring room) with knife wounds to her back. Evidently some bad guy was chasing some other person and this woman tourist was in the wrong place at the wrong time and he stabbed her as he ran by. There were 4 LAPD bicycle officers hanging out while she was treated.

Hospital ERs are interesting places...

a grand adventure stashed away for a future memory...

do i have to break something to get some ketamine? that second shot you post, i need some of that....

tell lil static to heal up quick. is he a south paw or will writing at school be an issue?

t

That IS a lot of stuff. I think I recognize the machine that goes "BING!"

As a parent I can't imagine what that's like. It breaks my heart if my daughter skins her knee... that's got to be really tough.

Why'd they haul you all the way back to Westwood? Isn't there a hospital in MDR?

Glad he's on the mend.

wow. he just got out of helping you pack up and move!

he will heal so fast at that age. our age?, not so much.

Thanks for sharing a good story. Glad he will be okay. We have been lucky with our kid so far. (knock on wood)
I spent Thursday in the ER myself. Maybe I'll post that in another thread.

OUCH!

Glad that all it was was an arm!

Hope that it's not too traumatic for him!

Wow a full out ER visit with knock out drugs. As a kid that grew up in the "olden" days of the 50s & 60s I only broke one arm, a collar bone and my big toe in six places. My brother fell out of a tree and broke both arms at the same time. He used to beat the he*l out of me with those arm cast. We never had full anesthesia for any broken bones.

I remember when I broke my big toe in six places I knew I something painful was going to happen when six big orderlies walked into the treatment room. The Dr. followed carrying a wooden dowel for me to bite on. The six guys held me down as I bit down on the stick. The Dr. grabbed my toe and did the "Tennessee toe torture" right from an episode of the Beverley Hillbillies. He re-set my toe and then he burned a hole in my toenail with a hot needle. I had a cast up to my knee for six weeks.

I managed to smash my toe with a man-hole cover. That is long story for another time.

Nostatic, I am glad your son is OK. Modern medicine is a wonderful thing. If that had happened just 100 years ago he could well have died if not crippled for life.

Glad he's OK. While they are the most pain most of us will ever feel, going through childhood without breaking a bone would be missing the whole kid experience :D

Hi mom requested UCLA as his regular doc is part of the UCLA network and she had her surgeries there. They were going to take him to Brockman in Culver City.

Of course I was wearing one of my work polo shirts with USC logo on it. I caught a little verbal abuse for that...

Without getting political...and just for comparative purposes...I would be very interested to hear what this episode will cost you, and who will pay for it.

Todd,
Glad he's doing well.

Maybe Brotman has changed. It wouldn't have been my first choice back in the day.

The medical treatment of the middle ages were a little worse.
Glad to hear it turned out ok. The emotional support is what will be most important in the coming weeks, the body is it's best long-term doctor .

Important: check on irritation/reddness problems around I.V. penetrations, and make sure blood thinners are properly applied and monitored! No mersa or strokes allowed.

We'll see when the bills come. My insurance should cover all of it - there is a reason that my work and I both pay a substantial chunk of money every month. The camp may also end up covering paramedia/ambulance as they called it and it is part of their SOP (and their insurance is factored into the camp dues).

I'm figuring it probably is a $5K visit.

Glad your boys gonna be ok.

Funny I worked in MDR for 5 years. Worked in the last building at the end of Fiji way:) great place to work, right on the water. I still get down there alot. We will have to meet for lunch sometimes.

hoping he heals quickly!SmileWavy

Glad things turned out OK. You were both lucky you could get there to be with him in such a short time. I bet it helped the situation out a lot as far as he was concerned. Good luck to him in his recovery.

Ouch. Tell Cal to get well soon from Curtis and Don.

Give me a call/text. I work at the 6 story building at the corner of Fiji and Lincoln so I'm there pretty much every day during the week unless I'm traveling.

Funny, yesterday I rode my bike down to pick up my car at the MAC and I saw some nice men in yellow jump suits doing some gardening down at the building you're talking about. I believe they are working off part of their debt to society ;)

man does this bring back memories i've broken more bones then i can and wish to remember.7 breaks and countless stitches. i always hated having the anesthetic injection more because when it gets injected it feels like someone put your arm in a vice. but man when those drugs hit me i was in heaven. last time i broke my arm while bing a snowboarding instructor i had a beautiful nurse by my side hitting on me and i was flying high as a kite. he will heal quicker than you know but the first week is always the worst as you realize what you can and cannot do.

All the best for sub-Static

my son just got his cast off a couple of weeks back - broke it 7/5 - same arm and it sounds like the same kind of break. second time he has done it.

this time he broke it at home and while he did it in front of me I couldn't see him as he was behind the kitchen counter. I heard him grunt and then he said - " I broke my arm again "

I told his friend they had to go home - we walked out to the car, he climbed in and I gave him a pillow to help support his arm and off we went.

Start to finish at the ER we where out in about 2.5 hours - maybe three as he was really zonked on special k. at one point he looked at me and said "dad you have three heads"

Total bill came out just under 9 grand. Insurance covered a large chunk of it.

Sucks it happened, but if he is anything like my 6 y/o he will be back up to speed by tomorrow figuring out how to use the gimpy arm.

Glad he is ok.

My favorite line during the post-drug haze:

"reality was stretching, then there was this white frame, then reality stretched again..."

It went on like that for about a half hour, punctuated with the occasional, "I don't know what I'm saying," and "I love you mom, I love you dad," and "did I really break my arm," etc...

That's a lot better than the foul language I spew. I've had to call back and apologize a couple of times.

Whoa, Todd! Glad he's going to be okay. Talk about a nightmare starting with that call... :(

I had a similar break when I was a bit younger than your son.

Right arm, broke both bones about 2 inches above the wrist. They were rather complex fractures, and took forever to set. I did not get the drug treatment as far as I remember. I do remember biting down on a hackey sack while the doctor counted to three. I think I blacked out after that.

Full cast past the elbow- it was a huge plaster one and very heavy. I was a little, skinny squirt and it was hard to live with.

Went back later for some final xrays and found out that the bones had set wrong. I remember my mother being PISSED. They had to re-break my arm. I think I took the drugs for that one. Afterwards I got just a small cast.

total time in two casts was about 4 1/2 months I think. Not good times.

The upside to all this that, since I was so young and I was in that cast for so long I became ambidextrous. I had to write with my left in school. After the case was off I would alternate using left and right as my right just didn't feel the same.

I still alternate when writing, and this later went on to foster my hobby in playing the drums.



Hope he feels better with that thing soon!

That's a kid right of passage. Glad everything is ok. No matter how hard you try, you can't keep your kid out of the ER.

http://www.calebdaniloff.com/whereir...y_2-754379.jpg

hoy! hopefully this was your 'hospital story' and the rest is smooth sailing!

Hey, at least he has a good story.

I've only ever broken one bone, and the story is lame. I was in 7th Grade. It was raining, so our genius gym teacher had us playing volleyball with a football. We were supposed to pass the ball over the net. That lasted all of three seconds. Anyway, someone spiked the ball (football), and I dove for it, and it smashed my left thumb against the gym floor. I kept playing figuring the pain would wear off in a few minutes. It didn't. Getting changed after gym class was a pain because I couldn't grip anything with my left hand--it made tying my shoes really fun. By this time, my thumb had turned purple and blue, so I walked down to the nurses office and declared that I think I had broke my thumb... A few hours late I had a cast.

Was he acting like this after the drugs?

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Broke the same arm in the same place at age 7. Part of growing up... hope he is ok.

I had a ridiculous number of broken arms as a kid, something like 8 breaks by age 18. Broke my arm 2 years in a row doing the exact same thing. (5th and 6th grade). It's easy to do, they're limbs hanging off of your body.

Most were simple fractures but a couple required either surgery or major re-setting. My orthopedic MD was also a distant relative, I have a memory of him humming and and singing "one toke over the line" while casting my arm in about 1970. I certainly never got any strong pain medication to take home; and with the exception of one hospital surgery to re-break and re-set an arm that was healing wrong, no general anesthesia ever.

I've had ketamine for oral surgery and it's the one drug that I absolutely refuse to be administered under any circumstance now. Narcotics don't bother me one bit and generally don't have an "after-life", (unless you're a junkie or get strung-out in a hospital). "Special K" is the nastiest substance I've ever had in my body, it's what I imagine PCP or meth to be like. Horrible aftertaste in the body and brain. Maybe it was just me and others don't get the same thing from it but I'd rather swallow draino.

I think that it's tough for some people to make the transition with a male child from the nurturing that is appropriate as a small child to letting them have their experiences when their balls drop. It was easy for my parents because they had their hands full w/ other children and sort of forgot about me most of the time. (Out of sight/out of mind). He'll be fine. We're all animals w/ survival instincts.

Glad to hear your boy is OK. I remember seeing him as a young guy. He had grown and matured considerably.

Good job at calming everyone. Sometimes that is the most important job, David

Make sure Calvin affords proper healing time for that arm - including once the cast is off. I know a kid who has broken the same arm 3x within a 2 yr span riding his skateboard. That boy needs to suck it up and wear a brace (protective gear is ghey...so I'm told) on that arm before he really screws it up permanently.

After years of Pop Warner football, little league baseball, rec basketball, and now Martial Arts Zack has been fortunate to have only suffered a rolled ankle, squashed finger, and a couple black eyes. Hope this post doesn't throw the kabash on his good fortune thus far...

Sorry about your son, Nostatic. Speedy recovery.