Never Use Your Face As A Brake Pad

It’s been a week since my last post. It’s not because I had nothing to say. It’s not because I was too lazy to write. And it’s not because I had my priorities all bass akwards. No, it’s simply because there were not enough hours in the days nor days in the week.

Tuesday started off like any other day….trudging to the kitchen to make coffee with only one eye open while I try to catch another couple of zzz’s with my closed eye. Once both eyes were open and my brain started chugging along, I took care of emails, completed and edited another article for one of my sites, and took on yet another writing assignment. In between researching my article, washing lunch dishes and doing laundry, I took a few minutes to relax.

While I was debating whether I wanted to take a quick drive down to the river to get some end of summer photos of the                                                         ducks and swans, or to just grab a good book and a cup of tea, my phone began to ring. After I deciphered the frantic message and reality smacked me in the head, I grabbed my car keys and headed out the door. My 12 year old granddaughter had been in a bicycle accident and it appeared she needed stitches.

My daughter is trained to take vitals and administer first aid, including stitching up a gash. Unfortunately, she does not do well with driving her own bleeding child to the emergency room. So while I raced to her side, I assumed I would be doing the driving. I didn’t want to worry her by reminding her that I don’t do well with the site of spurting blood, so I drove white-knuckled to her home, bracing myself for the possibility that I would flop in a dead faint if red sticky stuff was streaming out of Aurora.

I screeched into a parking space next to the house just as Lindsay and the bleeding Aurora came out. That’s when I learned I would not be driving. Lindsay simply wanted my company. Apparently, Lindsay wasn’t afraid of dying, just dying without her mommy. So now there were two of us who were nervous; she because of her daughter’s state and me because of mine.

4 days after the bicycle spill

Lisa Simpson (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As it turned out, Aurora had an ugly gash across her cheek and a seriously split lip. The gash rested on a background of swollen brush burned face. It required 5 stitches. Her lip only needed one, but was so puffed out, her profile looked like Lisa Simpson.

Once the crisis was over, and Aurora was made comfortable, I finally asked for the full story:

The girls had received bicycles for Christmas, but moving a week later, and the fact that it was winter, had caused them to be packed away and forgotten for several months. When they were brought out to ride, it was discovered that some adjustments and tightening needed to be done before they were good to go.

My son-in-law is quite the procrastinator. At the end of summer, orders were issued for him to have the bikes made ready. Up until the present, the family had resided in the country where there was very little room for learning to ride a bicycle. None of the children were proficient and it was time for a change. So Kris went about tightening and adjusting and then sent the girls out to ride so long as they stayed together. Not a smart thing to do since the streets around their home are all steep inclines or declines, depending on the direction being traveled. To make matters worse, apparently the hand brake on Aurora’s bike tended to slip. Now, keep in mind, these kids don’t know how to ride a bike.

It seems that Aurora was doing pretty well, all things considered, until she realized she was running out of street. The end intersected with a busy highway and she needed to turn around. Seeing a bank parking lot, she turned to enter but realized she was going to fast. The combination of hitting the faulty handbrake too hard simultaneously with the front bicycle wheel hitting the curb sent her flying through the air over the handle bars. She landed face first in gray, jagged landscaping rocks.  When Albert Einstein said that “life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving,” he didn’t account for kids like Aurora!  

All this took place while Mom was on her way home from work.  After dealing with the usual maddening commotion facing her arrival home, she entered the kitchen to find her husband busily stirring a pot of soup for dinner. The two girls were nowhere to be found until Ryder came out to inform her that Aurora had cut her face. That’s when Lindsay discovered her battered and bleeding daughter trying to stem the flow of blood from her face with nothing more than a paper towel.

After racing around to get Aurora cleaned up, iced and ready for a trip to the emergency center, she confronted Kris, demanding to know what the hell he was thinking. Didn’t he know how bad the cut was? Didn’t he understand that she obviously needed stitches?

Turning from his pot of bubbling soup, Kris looked at her in surprise and said, “Well, yeah, I knew she needed stitches. But I figured you could do it.”

Lindsay threw him a look as only she can throw, and rolling her eyes in exasperation, “Jesus, Kris! What is this? 1824? I don’t have cat gut just laying around the house!” (cat gut is the old fashioned thread used in suturing)

Needless to say, I found it difficult to leave once the emergency was over as I was given a front row seat to some immense entertainment at my son-in-law’s expense.

 

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