Well after the events of the last blog update we had a bit of excitement with Nadia. We decided at the last minute we would head to Calgary for visit for the last weekend of May. We hadn’t been back since Christmas and our daycare was on holidays for 2 days so we thought might as well. It is 7 hour drive to Calgary from Kelowna, that is a 7 hours non- stop without a toddler. With a toddler, it can range from the 9 hour mark and up. When we went home at Christmas our drive home was crazy, there was a horrific accident and then closed the highway down about 3 hours from home. We were stuck, we had to take a different route that included 2 ferries and some scary mountain roads, that trip took us over 14 hours to get home, we got home just as they were reopening the highway. We would have spent the night in the nearest town, but there were no rooms at the inn.
Anyhow, this trip proved to be not as horrific (well I guess maybe it was, depending on how you look at it), but another adventure. We decided about 20 minutes outside of Golden, that we would pull in for at a rest stop. If you have ever driven through the Rockies, there are tonnes of pull-ins, picnic spots, little hiking trails etc. They are great, and usually have a nice view or an interesting thing to see (this is my plug for Parks Canada) so we pulled in and were having a look around, letting dog out and giving Nadia a few minutes to explore. Of course neither Thor nor I were looking at her when it happened, but the next thing we hear ‘Owie’. I turn to look, and see blood squirting everywhere (in retrospect I don’t think it was actually spurting, just dripping, but fastly dripping) which made my heart go into my throat.
Now, when you have just spent the better part of 1.5 years with a kid with low blood levels, your initial thought is ‘jesus Christ this kid is going to bleed to death, in the middle of the rocky mountains’ then your voice of reason kicks in and says ‘she HAS platelets now, calm down!’ then you breathe and panic hits again ‘oh F#&*, this kid doesn’t have her tetanus!’ then you remember, ‘yes she does! Thank-god she just started her immunizations again’ and then because you are in the middle of the Rocky Mountains and saw a grizzly bear on your drive to Calgary you think, ‘the bears are gonna smell the blood and come charging for us and eat us alive’ then you realize ‘bears are not like sharks, you are gonna be ok, but let’s get into the truck to clean the rest of this gapping gash’.
So after we got Nadia cleaned up and got a better look at the still bleeding finger, we figure she is definitely going to need stitches. UGH! Like it was a gash, a small one, but a gooder. So we turned around and it was back to Golden hospital for us.
We got there and they took a look at it, put numbing cream on it and then explained Nadia would probably need a wee sedative to get the stitches. So they mixed it in with some apple juice and Nadia was drunk as a skunk within 20 minutes, and I wish I had drank the rest of the magic apple juice, because for everything Nadia has been through and things we have seen, gapping wounds with stitches still freak me out. Not so much her getting them, it’s the thought of them getting pulled out by accident. Bleh.
Nadia got 3 stitches, not sure how the doc fit them on her tiny figure but she did and Nadia was a trooper, even after the drugs wore off. And she learned to cope with her finger all bandaged up. She cried a bit when we changed her bandages, but more so that she didn’t want us to take it off. She knew it had to be covered up to keep it safe. She is an amazing little girl and for everything that she has gone through she blows my mind as to how quick she gets over it and moves on. I wish I was like that. They say don’t sweat the small stuff, but Nadia is also teaching us not to sweat the big stuff either. I am a lucky mommy.
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