Every time I see a friend’s post of photos of their cuts, scrapes, wounds and scars, I shake my head and quickly swipe past. Sorry you got hurt, I’ll definitely pray for a speedy recovery, but, Lord help us, I just don’t want to see that and have it burned on my retina. Breathe easy; no such gory pictures will attend this post; just a story of caring for Julian.
When I started blogging, exercising the writing muscles, I wanted to include bits on our special needs family life; stories that, along with all that interests me, from music to America, to good guacamole and exceptional coffee, would help those peeking in from the outside see truth and reality, hope and grace. Some of the truth we live with caring for Julian involves injuries, blood and seizures.
Last week I saw a captioned photo of a skateboarding, brave little boy and showed it to Sarah. We both chucked knowingly. Being an all boy family, extended family on her side too (only nephews), we get the whole guy-thing. There is nothing frilly, delicate, pretty, cute or soft in our child rearing experience. It is all gutsy, dirty, grimy, smelly and sticky. Always and only. That’s the gig when raising boys.
And we love it!
LEGO’s scattered everywhere, marker stains on the walls, perpetual stickiness on nearly every surface and a certain odiferous-ness that hangs in each bedroom are all par for our course. So are cuts, scrapes, wounds and scars.
Julian loves Ask This Old House and all things building projects. Our garage is really a
constantly reconfigured workshop of woodworking, wiring and plumbing projects. Usually, by days end it turns into a rock n roll show as he practices his drumming, but then it reverts to a Lowe’s and Home Depot tool repository before lights out. He’s created some amazing projects that he first learned about from the ATOH guys. “Working in the garage” is a big part of his everyday.
While working on a wood and drill project late into the evening Thursday, the drill slipped and Julian managed to ram a drill bit into his palm. We heard the scream of pain and moments later he came in clutching his forearm with blood dripping from his palm. We set him down, flipped on more lights, examined his hand and immediately realized this was an ER visit moment. But we also knew what was coming. Often, when Julian sees his own blood, beyond a small scrape, a seizure is coming. He can even feel it approaching. A seizure can be a problem at this point in his life because he’s a big dude now. Fortunately, we had him seated on the couch, had his hand wrapped, as we started to grab shoes, keys, IDs and phones (with guardianship document pics on them) when the seizure took hold of him.
If you’ve never seen a loved one have a seizure, you should understand there are varying degrees, rated from petit mal to grand mal. Julian landed somewhere in between with this one. There’s nothing to do for him at that point but to keep him as safe as possible from falling and from further injury; you let it happen and hope it’s brief. For the severity of his pain and the blood he saw, fortunately, it was brief enough. He came back around and we managed to get him in the car. Julian’s normal postictal response is to sleep, but we managed to move quick enough that he walked himself to the car and then a bit later into the ER.
Gentle nurses and x-ray techs got him cleaned up, looked over and let the doctor know no bones were broken and the wound had been cleaned out and could be stitched up. Sarah has said for a while that a normal part of caring for Julian in these kinds of situations is to “tell the providers what they need to know” meaning, his limitations and conditions. Obviously, he has a bloodied hand; what’s not so obvious is his limited capacities and understandings and even possible seizures that could descend. We have to do this because if you ask him “how are you?”
he always answers “good”. If a healthcare provider were to ask him to rate his pain from 1 to 10, Julian honestly couldn’t answer, as numbers and math and values elude him. My wife is brilliant and concise with conveying all that is Julian in a couple of short sentences. We explained him repeatedly that early morning, including to the doctor once he entered the process to stitch up Julian’s hand. The doc seemed to “get it” and talked with us all about his own home remodeling projects and some of his favorite power tools.
The Julian-explanation is a regular part of our special needs life. I imagine every parent in this realm has their own similar talking points on speed repeat. We regularly have to be the ones to interpret to and for Julian. A stranger just wouldn’t know the situation by looking at him. That one not so little detail may be the one that most non-special needs parents just don’t “get”. We’ve acted as Julian’s bubble and still must in many ways, especially when he’s hurt and needing care.
Back to early Friday morning’s care... they numbed his hand and then it was five good stitches from Dr David. The nurse bandaged everything up with colorful wrap and we headed home for 10 days of healing, rest, hand wraps and gentle living. The adventure ended by about 4:30am with everyone sleeping hard. My wake up call for work responsibilities sounded at 6:15am.
He’s healing well now 2 days later.
He is already shopping online (which means looking at Lowe’s ads on his iphone) for new tools, drill bits and project materials.
He’s also trying to figure out how he could hold a drum stick in his injured and bandaged hand.
He’s such a hoot!
Gutsy, I tell ya!!
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