A visit to the hospital

A few weeks ago Oscar pushed Calvin in the hallway right before we were about to start Family Home Evening. Calvin hit his forehead on the corner of the wall. The gash was deep enough that it needed medical attention that night so I took him to the emergency room at the local hospital. Germany doesn't have Urgent Care centers. So if your child needs medical attention, the options are the pediatrician or the ER.

Here's a photo that I took about five minutes after it happened:

The wound wasn't that bad -- Calvin stopped crying almost as soon as Tina put some gauze on it. And he fell asleep in the car on the way to the Emergency Room. The ER was very English-friendly. The forms I had to fill out were all in English and the doctor spoke English too. We only had to wait about ten minutes to be seen and it only took fifteen minutes for them to treat him. Here we are waiting to be seen:

The nurse glued the skin shut and put three small strips of adhesive gauze across the wound. We were thankful it didn't need stitches. The doctor told me to keep it dry for a week and monitor it for infection. The nurse didn't speak much English but she laughed when I started taking photos -- she chuckled, "Ein Krankenhaus Besuch."

All better!

We were in an out pretty quickly -- I only paid for 45 minutes of parking. The wound started to heal pretty quickly. Two days after the incident, Calvin started exhibiting a pair of black eyes:

Even though he didn't actually have stitches, Calvin kept on calling the tape "titches" and saying that he did not want to take them off. I took him to the pediatrician to have the tape removed just to make sure there were no lingering problems. Right before we went, I took a quick video with the camera:




Thankfully the tape came off without incident and the bruise has started to fade: