Friday, November 16, 2012

Abuse at Home or at the ER?

My son has a scar on his forehead. He's older now and laughs, says people say that it looks like the same one Harry Potter has! Remembering when he got it isn't as funny.

Who would have ever thought that a little kid, spinning in circles and walking crooked across the floor would end up hitting his head off of a cabinet and needing stitches? Not me!

Out of three kids, my youngest was the first I had ever had to take to the hospital emergency room at 18 months old and what I got when I got there, was nothing of what I expected! My oldest was eight at the time, she was a big help! On the way to the hospital, she kept talking to him to keep him from crying and held a cold wash cloth on his head.

I got to the ER and my daughter was taken and sat outside the room where a doctor and nurses spent quite some time questioning her as to what happened before they came and asked me and took a look at the wound on the little guys head.

She was as scared as her brother, she didn't spend a lot of time in hospitals or with people she didn't know.  While I can understand all of these people asking her what happened, I never could understand why the fifteen minutes of questioning a little kid before coming to me.

If I hadn't taken her with me, they would have had to talk to me first. I can truly understand asking a kid for answers because usually kids don't lie and if they do, it's easy to detect because they change their answers so frequently, but in this case, I wasn't a regular visitor, neither of the kids had bruises, their hair and clothes were clean except for the blood from his head.

I would think that taking care of his wound would have been first priority but it wasn't and that really upset me! Aren't there more things to look at than a wound on a kid to start digging and trying to find out if a kid has been abused?

After all the questions my daughter and I got and them doing their best to make me feel like a failure, they ended up taking and belting him down on a papoose board, covering his whole body with a white disposable cloth, except where they were going to put his stitches, letting him scream while they were working on him and then complaining that he wouldn't hold still  and not letting me near him to comfort him was more abuse in my opinion than they were assuming that they would find.

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