Why I Carry Butterfly Bandages in My Wallet

When Mackenzy was seven months old, we moved from Amarillo to Midland. The week before we were to move into our new house I drove to Fort Worth to visit my family. Kregg had been out of town on business, and so it was just the two little girls and me traveling from Fort Worth back to Midland. It's normally about a five hour drive, but on this day it ended up taking eight hours. Mackenzy started screaming and nothing I did helped. She had developed her very first ear infection. I ended up stopping in a little town and walking into the emergency room of the hospital to find out what was wrong. Little did I know how many times in the next several years she would require medical attention.
The first couple of months in Midland were spent settling in. We worked at getting everything unpacked and organized in the new house. Kregg was learning the ropes in his new position with the company. We had found a church home and met a few of the neighbors. We didn't know anyone in Midland when we moved here, except a family that had been transferred at the same time. I had yet to find a pediatrician for the girls. 
Mackenzy had started walking at 10 months. One day about noon, she tripped and hit her head on the edge of a coffee table. I knew as soon as I saw it that it needed stitches. I tried calling Kregg's office, but he had left for lunch and there was no way to reach him. I called my sweet friend that had moved from Amarillo with us. I thought I was pretty calm, but as soon as she answered the phone she asked me what was wrong.
"Mackenzy just fell and busted her head open and I can't find Kregg!!!!"
She said, "We'll be right there."
I then called the neighbor we had become friends with across the street. Her husband had come home for lunch and he answered the phone. Once again, I thought I was speaking in a normal tone of voice. 
He immediately said, "Anne, what's the matter?"
"Mackenzy just fell and busted her head open!!!!!! I can't take Hannah when we go to the doctor."
He said, "We'll be right over."
My neighbors were at the front door within a couple of minutes. They took Hannah to their house and kept her until I returned. My friend Cindy arrived and we discussed what to do. She suggested a minor emergency clinic she had seen not far from our house. We walked in and asked, over Mackenzy's screaming, if they could do stitches there. The receptionist said that they could help us. I expected them to take us right back, but we had to wait a while. Their sense of urgency did not match my own. 
We were finally shown into a large open area in the back of the clinic. The doctor came in to examine her and told us that it did indeed need stitches. They strapped Mackenzy onto a "papoose board". That did not go over well. She started screaming at the top of her lungs and flailing about. The papoose board was no match for this wiry ten month old baby!  She kept popping the velcro loose on the papoose board!! The doctor and nurses couldn't believe it. My friend and I and two nurses were holding her down while the doctor was trying to stitch her up. It certainly did not help that the cut was right below her eyebrow. He finally was able to put two stitches in and then he said he needed a break. He paced around in circles trying to calm down so he could come back and put the other couple of stitches in. The poor little thing had been screaming so loudly for so long that when she would pause to draw breath, her eyes would roll back in her head. It scared me at first, but then I began to think it would actually be better if she just passed out long enough to finish the stitches.

A few months later, she did it again! She had been jumping on the bed and hit her head on the headboard. She laid open the exact same spot above her other eye! In between these two injuries, we had been to the doctor many, many times. The ear infections came one after another. Our new pediatrician had referred us to an Ear, Nose, and Throat doctor. Someone had told me that when (not if) Mackenzy needed stitches again, to take her to our ENT. As a surgeon, an ENT is very skilled with stitches. I called her office and explained what had happened. They told me to bring her in. The doctor would examine her and either stitch her up there, or take her across the street to the hospital and sedate her before stitching her up. Thankfully, she was able to take care of it in the office. I locked my arms and legs around her and the doctor was done before Mackenzy knew what had happened. Of course the doctor and I were both somewhat deaf afterward from the decibel level of Mackenzy's screaming!

I worried the first few months of seeing our new pediatrician that she would think I was not taking good care of Mackenzy. She always had a big goose egg on her head or a cut or scrape or bruise somewhere. But the doctor had seen enough kids to recognize that this one was just very prone to accidents. She would laugh and ask me what she had done this time. And there was always a story to tell. Kregg and I used to joke about putting her in a bicycle helmet before we got her out of the crib in the morning!
We were in the mall one time and Mackenzy started running. She was looking back over her shoulder running full speed ahead. We were telling her to stop running and she smacked straight into a wall. The force of the collision knocked her flat of her back. She landed with such a thud that the clerks in the store heard it and came rushing out to check on her. One of them had a glass of ice and they took a t-shirt off the shelf, dumped the ice in it and gave it to us to hold on the knot that was forming on her head. 

The ear infections didn't stop and so at about 15 months old, we were scheduled to have tubes put in. Our ENT came out to give us the pre-op speech. When she finished, I sheepishly said to her, "Doctor, you know Mackenzy well enough to understand this request. She has a big splinter in her finger and I was wondering if, while she is sedated, you could take it out. We will pay extra. Kregg and I have not been able to hold her still long enough to remove it."
When the doctor came out after performing the surgery, she gave us her post-op speech. Thankfully, everything had gone well. She then told us, "I took that splinter out of her finger. I went ahead and checked her other fingers, too. She had two more splinters in her other hand, so I removed those as well."
She definitely understood our plight.
The third time she needed stitches, we were at the lake with some friends. Thankfully, one of them was a nurse. We were walking down a little dirt road with Mackenzy toodling along in front of us. All of a sudden, she tripped and fell face first. She bounced her head on a small rock in the road and, you guessed it, cut her head open. It was the only rock anywhere near us! Our nurse friend said that they would stitch it up if we took her in. After her previous traumatic experiences with stitches, and since she told us it wouldn't make a difference in the size of the scar, we decided skip the stitches, clean it out well and close it up with bandaids.

I wish I could say that the majority of the accidents ended with the toddler stage, but that just wasn't the case. She fell off the trampoline and broke her arm. She was running around in circles on the driveway one evening and her feet went out right out from under her. She landed on her mouth and her eye tooth came all the way through her lip. She needed stitches inside and out for that one.
We used to joke and call her the "bag lady" because one of her favorite things to do was to gather up any kind of bag and pack it with whatever she came across. Of course, it was never as much fun to unpack the things and put them away, but she packed them up anyway. One day she had packed everything up and taken her bags outside. We had a golden retriever at that point that was absolutely terrified of thunderstorms.I am convinced that this dog could escape a concrete bunker in a storm; nothing could keep her in her yard. The problem was that when she escaped, she shredded anything she could get hold of.

Hannah, Mackenzy, and Caleb were out in the back yard. Kregg was weeding our garden and I was in the house on the phone helping to plan some church event. Mackenzy had her bags in the yard and was on the swing. Whatever she did, she did with her entire being, so when I say she was swinging, she was going just as high as she possibly could. Completely absorbed in her play, she didn't notice the storm brewing on the horizon. As she reached the very peak of her swing, a clap of thunder boomed overhead. She bailed out of the swing and landed flat on her nose and her hip bones. From inside the house I heard this terrible screeching. I hung up on whoever it was I was talking to and made a mad dash for the back door. By the time I got out on the porch, Mackenzy met me. She had her hands covering her face and blood was dripping off both elbows!!
I was horrified, having no idea what had happened. When she took her hands down from her face, she was already swollen to the point that the bridge of her nose had disappeared! 
Of course, the same clap of thunder that scared Mackenzy also terrified the dog. She had climbed out of her pen and proceeded to tear Mackenzy's bags open. She was running laps around the yard as fast as she could go, shredding things as she ran. To top it all off it began to rain!

The other kids were trying to corral the dog and pick up all the stuff in the yard. Kregg came and helped me get Mackenzy inside. We called the doctor and she told us there was really nothing to do for a broken nose as long as it wasn't just terribly crooked. Ice and ibuprofen and time were the only remedies. Of course, it looked worse before it looked better because both her eyes turned lovely shades of black, green and purple.

We have a good friend who loves to tell this story. He was sitting at an Indian Princess camp out when Kregg pulled up in our van with the girls. He looked at the man sitting next to him and told him that within 60 seconds of the time the door opened on the van, someone would be screaming (meaning Mackenzy). The side door of the van flew open, Mackenzy came flying out and within 5 seconds had fallen and was screaming. The man next to him looked at our friend in shock and asked how on earth he knew that would happen. He just smiled and said, "It happens all the time."

The most recent of Mackenzy's accidents occurred when she had her wisdom teeth taken out. They had her come in fasting for the surgery.  It went well and she was in recovery within an hour. She was pretty loopy when I went back to sit with her. When she was released to leave, the nurse helped me get her in the Suburban. My instructions were to get her a smoothie and have her prescriptions filled. I then took her home, gave her a pain pill and put her to bed. I needed to run to the store, so I left Caleb with her and told him I would be back as quickly as possible, thinking that she would still be asleep.

Caleb called a little while later and told me that Mackenzy had gotten hurt. I came home to find her crying. Caleb said that she had staggered from her room to the kitchen. She was trying to take her next pain pill when she suddenly blacked out and crumpled in a heap on the floor. Thankfully, she didn't hit her head on the edge of the counter. Instead, when she fell, she rolled her foot and landed on it! Caleb scooped her up and carried her to her bed. I took her to the emergency room and it was broken! Of course, it was her right foot and she drives a 5 speed Honda Civic. That meant for the next several weeks, I had to drive her to all her college classes and to work.

A couple of weeks into it, she was walking down the hall at her office on her crutches and her arm slipped. She pulled something in her right forearm and had to be in a splint for a couple of weeks while trying to walk on crutches. You should have seen people's faces when they asked her what on earth had happened, meaning the cast and splint and crutches, and she answered, "I had my wisdom teeth removed."

That is why I carry butterfly bandages in my wallet!!