My brothers (often with my sister and I thrown in) fought. They hit each other, and sometimes with objects, such as golf clubs and baseball bats. They wrecked on bikes and in cars. There was blood, stitches and casts. And that was just the beginning.
In my little family now, we have experienced most of that. I have become very adept at assessing the need for emergency medical attention. I can butterfly almost any cut, as long as I'm not too concerned with cosmetic appearance. We have had baseball bats, fence posts, dumbells and golf clubs all used as projectiles against heads. There has been a lot of blood, quite a few stitches and several casts. But this one threw me for a loop . . .
Patrick had been invited to a lake house for the day by some friends in September. They swam and played and had a good time. Several days after that trip, he came to me with his finger swollen three times its normal size and confessed that he was hit in the finger by a BB. I drained the finger of a good amount of bloody pus multiple times over the next week. The finger got a lot better, but yet this bump persisted.
Now, of course, one asks oneself many questions: Why did you have a BB gun? Why were you shooting the gun? Why were they shooting the gun AT you? What if it was your face, your eye, your ear? Was there a cliff nearby and were your friends jumping off that too?!
Long story short, despite multiple assurances that the BB did not break the skin and actually go in, we found out today (yes, almost three months later) that that was exactly the case when we went to have this finger lesion taken care of by a good friend.
I'm almost afraid to ask, "What next?"
