baby's first emergency room visit

Yesterday, we went to the zoo.

We go to the zoo a lot. We usually let G walk around at his leisure, and he usually heads straight toward the playground. Nashville's zoo has the largest community-built playground in the country. And it's definitely large.

I'm kinda in love with it.

G is just getting to the point where he can explore the area. He can even walk up some of the steps by himself as long as he has something to hold onto.

Toward the end of our visit, he indicated that he wanted to go down one of their many curly tube slides. It looked like this:

I had gone down many slides with G. I knew to watch out for his feet so they didn't get stuck. But the confines of the tube slide were tighter than I expected. We curved to the right, but G's left foot stuck to the side of the tube.

I swear his leg didn't even move that much, but he cried out. Then he started crying the way he does when something hurts or when he's scared. However, by the time we got out of the slide and I picked him up, he had stopped crying. In fact, rather quickly, he wanted back down to run around. I put him down, but he almost immediately cried out, stumbled, and collapsed to the ground.

We took off his shoe and sock, check out his ankle. It looked fine with no immediate swelling. We decided to take him to a more level type of ground to test out his walking again. So we did. But again he pretty much wouldn't put any weight on that foot.

At this point, I was trying very hard not to completely freak out.

Being a Saturday, we couldn't take him to our pediatrician, but we did call the after-hours triage nurse, who directed our concerns to the on-call doc. He told us to just go ahead and go to the children's hospital.

I really did lose it then. In the back seat behind me, G was babbling up a storm like nothing had happened.

We didn't have to wait long at the hospital to be seen. I basically had time to pee and that was it. G still couldn't walk on his left leg. He hated everything they did to him - taking his heart rate and blood pressure, looking at his leg, taking xrays. He was on high alert, so anything even remotely off made him cry. The whole experience just broke my heart. All in all, it took about three hours to get there, have xrays done, and get the results.

NO FRACTURES. Thank God!

They said he likely tweaked something a bit. They didn't rule out the possibility of a hairline fracture that wouldn't manifest itself until later in the week. If he's not better in a couple of days, we're supposed to take him to our pedi to get reevaluated. Even on pain meds, his sleep last night was awful. This morning, though, he's been in his normal high spirits. He's walking with a limp, but that's expected. As long as he doesn't get worse, we're assuming he's fine and only bruised up.

I feel so bad for what happened, especially because he was sitting on my lap at the time. I'm swearing off slides until he's fifteen! I know this is only the beginning of what we face with our bundle of energy, but I had hoped this stuff wouldn't happen until he was more of a kid than a toddler, you know?

I really hope he continues to heal. He's certainly in much better shape than he was yesterday. There's no swelling or discoloration, so everything points to a full recovery soon.