It was a typical weekend here…inasmuch as there is such a thing. The spousal unit is cloistered after realizing that her stats course is even more mental than she feared it would be so I’m just laying low to avoid any shrapnel injuries…except that I’ve got kiddies in tow. No problem…except for the occasional meltdown due to little brother torment or little girl angst, they’re mostly content to play as I putter around the house trying to get ready for the transition between summer and autumn. Things are going relatively smooth…which is always something you need to worry about. Chaos breeds in the shallow waters of complacency, doesn’t it?
So I’m hanging up some really cool local vintage fire department photos after carefully framing, matting and attaching hardware. I’ve found a wall I can repurpose for the four 8x10s and I’m on the last frame…it’s an aluminum frame and I’ve already cut myself twice on the sharp corners. I put it up and decide it needs to move up about an inch or so to line up with the others so I take it off the wall and, as it sometimes happens, my 4 year old boy who likes to hover nearby and watch me work, has meandered into position just below my line of peripheral vision. As i lower the metal frame it connects with his head. He screams. It’s the kind of scream that stands apart from the “she’s sitting in the place where I usually sit!” scream. I immediately pick him and rush him to the bathroom counter where I can do a quick size-up of the situation. Instinct.
I assume I’d hit his scalp with the corner of frame…I expected lots of blood because there are lots of capillaries on the scalp. I found nothing…then I noticed he was cupping his eye. I peeled his hand from his face as his screams intensified and immediately noticed blood streaming from his tightly closed right eye. Time to kick it into third gear. I grabbed him and rushed to the spousal unit on the porch and barked out some demands about car keys and his medical card and moments later we were in the car speeding towards the ER. Having had, not so long ago, my eye poked by a child waving a fork, I was acutely cognizant of the kind of pain an eye injury can cause I was not in any mood to take chances so I was not about to delay any primary care. His screams were not abating and, by now, his sister was starting to cry because she sensed the urgency and fear where, normally, she’d simply be annoyed at him for making loud noises.
Halfway there, my wife, riding the back seat between the two hysterical children, managed to relax the boy enough with her sing-song motherly voice that he let her peek at his injury and she announced that the blood was coming from a cut just below his eye. Relief. I eased off the accelerator and soon pulled into a parking lot to reasses his injury. He wouldn’t let me wipe off the blood, of course, but I could pull back his upper eyelid enough to realized that his eye had not been nicked. I decided to cancel the ER visit and head home. The emergency was over and my adrenaline levels returned to normal.
Later, my wife remarked that she had never seen me panicking. I wasn’t panicking, I explained, since panic is what you do when you don’t know what to do. I was taking charge in a situation I felt was urgent…an eye injury can be pretty unforgiving so I reacted instrinctively and preemptively. I was grateful she was there to do a secondary assessment en route. So this story ends well. Hopefully his injury heals well and there is no scar. Lesson learned…whenever you’re working, be aware of your surroundings. You never know when a situation car turn sour.