So Thanksgiving was great. Family drama was pretty much nonexistent which is great (and pretty unusual for my family). But the post-Thanksgiving weekend was really tough.
Friday we went as a family to a local park to play a game of touch football and burn off some calories and energy. The day was in the mid-fifties and gorgeous. The group included my parents, my 3 brothers + their wives and kids, my 2 sisters + their husbands and kids, in total there were 26 of us.
Halfway through the game there is an incident. Joe had made a sharp turn to try to make a catch and ran right into Little One who had been tailing him. He tripped over her and in an effort to cushion her fall he used his hands to cradle her head. Because he had no hands free to catch his fall he fell square on his right shoulder. He's not one to complain so when it took him longer than a minute to dust himself off and get up I knew this would not be good. At first he thought he had dislocated his shoulder.
We headed home and my brother in law who is an MD (general practitioner) took a look and his best guess was it was either a broken collar bone or a separated shoulder (where it's not dislocated but all the tendons holding the joint together have been stretched or torn to the point where the arm is hanging).
Joe held out for a few hours before the pain got so bad that we had to go to the ER for an x-ray. Turns out it's a separated shoulder. The least bad of all the bad options it could be. So he's in a sling and on vicodin for pain. All while trying to finish up the end of the semester and his final pediatric clinical rotation. He has an 8 hour rotation in the ER at Children's Hospital scheduled for Wednesday and I know he's disappointed that he won't be able to be as hands on as he normally would be.
He has a follow-up with an orthopedist on Thursday morning to get more info on how long his shoulder will need to be in a sling.
Next post.... Little One takes her turn with a medical crisis.
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