Scary Stitches Saturday!

So the daily posts took a vacation the last few days. I will try and get caught up! Smorgasborg Saturday turned into Scary Stitches Saturday thanks to a lovely piece of PVC pipe. Consider this your warning-disturbing content to follow.
Saturday morning we had our friends, the Dorseys from Idaho, come over for breakfast. After partaking of some delicious pumpkin chocolate chip pancakes, bacon and cocoa, we sat around and visited and the kids all went outside to play. About 12pm the fun started. The kids had all gone to the fort and came back with a plethora of sticks, pvc pipe and concrete stakes. A few minutes later I heard Connor yelling that Cayden had been hit with a pipe and that he was bleeding. So I go running and see Cayden in the front yard with blood running down his neck onto his shirt. I thought that he had been hit with the pipe itself but actually one of the kids was whacking a pvc pipe on the tree and because it was so brittle it shattered into about 8 or more pieces-one of which flew into Cayden's neck, punctured it and cut it but then fell out. He was crying and I bolted over to him and saw the injury, grabbed his collar and put it up to his neck and applied pressure while hollering for Don and trying to get Cayden into the house. The wound was right below his ear about an inch and I was concerned that there was a major artery involved because of the amount of blood and the fact that it was really dark purple. When we got inside, Don went for the first aid box and got a bunch of gauze and then sat Cayden down on his lap while I panicked. I could not think of who to call other than the ambulance but Serena, my friend said to call Lisa, our neighbor who is a nurse. I had a hard time remembering her phone number and when I did remember, her line was busy. I sent Connor down to her house to get her and then I called our other neighbor Willy who is a cop to come and look at the injury to see if he needed stitches. We figured that he probably did but wanted another opinion. Both Willy and Lisa got there and said that it definitely needed to be looked at. Our Bishop was in the neighborhood and he came in and suggested that we just use Super Glue but Nurse Lisa said that was not such a good idea. The Bishop and Don gave Cayden a blessing and we waited for Don's mom to come over to stay with the other boys. Cody was at a Forensics tournament so he was unavailable for child care services. We took Cayden to the hospital in Mesquite. We were taken back to the room pretty quickly after a nurse came out to the waiting area and looked at the injury and said that yes he needed to be seen. We waited for a little while to see the doctor which was fine because Cayden's neck was only bleeding a little. The doctor suggested an X-ray just to make sure that none of the pipe was left in his neck and to check the surrounding soft tissue for injury. Cayden was acting fine and happy and even smiled for the Xray because the tech told him it was just like a picture. The Xray came back fine but the doctor said that needed a few stitches. That sent Cayden over the edge. While trying to get Cayden to lay down on the bed on his side so that he could get the stitches, Cayden started to freak out. That hole in his neck started gushing like a drinking fountain. The doctor was trying to give him the shots to numb the area so he could clean it and the whole time Cayden is screaming and crying. The doctor is grabbing gauze while I am holding Cayden's hands, Don is holding his feet and the nurse-a lady from our ward by the way-is holding his head. The back of head head was covered in blood and all down his back. Luckily there was a pad under neath Cayden's head that soaked up most of the blood that ran down his back. After the shots started working and the doctor was able to put in the stitches, Cayden calmed down and he stopped bleeding but that seemed like a long time. I had to turn my head into Don's shoulder mostly because of the psychological aspect of seeing my child bleeding to death on the bed. The doctor was very focused and very calm-too calm almost so I asked at one point after it seemed that Cayden had been bleeding for a long time if the doctor was concerned about all that bleeding and he said that he was but that it was ok. He thought that he might send us to see a vascular surgeon but he put the stitches in really deep and after that Cayden stopped bleeding. All of my children combined have not bled that much ever!! When the stitches were almost in and Cayden was calm I said to Julie, our nurse, "Tell me we are ok here" and she said that we were. We opted to toss the shirt Cayden was wearing and I also declined the photo op of that shirt with all that blood on it. I don't need a picture to remind me how much blood there was anyway. It was a bummer though because it was a new shirt that we all had just barely gotten that we were all gonna wear to the Pirate Football State Championship Game that was Saturday evening in Las Vegas. Connor went to the game with Don's parents, Caleb stayed home and sat on his bed because he had some serious 'tude going on when in to the game. I was a little paranoid about him leaving me and Cayden just in case something happened. Most of the valley was in Las Vegas and if Cayden started to bleed out again I don't know what I would do. He was fine but I was pretty anxious. I would have been content to strap him into my bed for the duration of the weekend so that he was still and quiet and in my sight. We did go to church on Sunday but I kept him home from school on Monday. We were getting ready to go to Utah and I would have gotten him out early anyway. We have tried to keep Cayden as still and calm as possible to keep his blood pressure down and avoid the potential for disaster. We even put a moratorium on the teasing and chasing of Cayden for a while. Pretty scary Saturday! Oh and by the way Pirates took State!!

The Culprit-who knows which piece it actually was!