i don't like blood

For those of you who know me well, you know that I can be pretty low-key when it comes to Blake's injuries or God-only-knows what he puts in his mouth. Though I did carry around hand sanitizer for a few weeks after his birth, it eventually languished unused in the bottom of the diaper bag. I figure I'm giving his immune system lots of exercise so that, instead of going into hyperdrive over a peanut, it can save its energy for the really bad germs, like girl cooties. He's also a surprisingly tough little kid, and when something hurts enough to make him cry, it doesn't last long. I tell him to brush it off (especially because, 99% of the time, it's not serious AT ALL), he dutifully swipes at his head, even if he hurt his toe, and we move right along.

Well, tonight he decided to turn circles between a friend's coffee table and couch. Dizzy circles, in a space no more than eighteen to twenty-four inches wide. Stopping, he lost his balance and fell hard, cracking his head on the corner of the solid wood table. I saw him fall, saw him grab at his mouth, and promptly swept him up to assess the damage. No blood in his mouth, no broken teeth, a slight reddening on his cheeks, but I was pretty sure that was from crying...nothing, nothing, and then he tipped his head back.

In a straight line across the bottom of his chin was an angry, red, inch-long split. Clean edges, some blood, and my heart promptly broke in two.

"Catherine, he needs stitches," I said loudly, as she was coming to help. Hyperventilating, a quick series of pictures flashed through my mind - he has a huge, vascular head, and a head wound is a very, very bad thing. It was past five and we will have to go to the emergency room and wait and wait and wait and my sweet, small boy will scream at the needle and then they will sew him up and I will have to hold him down and we will cry and cry and cry and he will have a scar that will one day be cool but right now is horrible because it is bleeding and I cannot handle blood. My son should never leak the red stuff, and when he does, I lose my shit.

Catherine can attest to this. With the clean edges, she calmly asked if, maybe, a butterfly bandage wouldn't work? At least at first?

"No, no, he's scared of band-aids." GRR! Why must he be scared of band-aids when the one time he really, really needs one, I cannot fix it with a clean sock? Catherine and Tjabe, her son, were great sports, showing Blake that Tjabe could have a band-aid too! They could match! What about an Elmo band-aid? What about this, that, the other thing?

Blake was having NONE OF IT. He had stopped crying as much, unless, of course, we uttered the verboten words: band-aid. Finally, I asked Catherine if she would help me hold him down after I got some of my first aid stuff from home. She agreed, and I went to my house. Coming back in the door with my salve (which he recognizes and likes, for some reason) and a box of our own band-aids (Catherine's were adorning everything BUT my child), Blake cheerfully told me that he got a race car band-aid.

Catherine looked at me a bit worried, saying "He thinks you're getting race car band-aids...is that what you have?"

Oh yes. I do. He picked them out months ago, screamed whenever I reached for one, and is now quietly sleeping with a Nexcare Tattoo Cars band-aid beneath his chin. He whimpered a tiny bit when I put it on, but we dashed to the bathroom to admire the tattoo-like picture on his face. He was so proud that Tjabe wanted one.

I don't know what Catherine did to persuade him that band-aids were not, in fact, evil incarnate, but between her convincing him of their inherent goodness and talking me down from my borderline hysteria, well, she's just riding in pretty high in my book tonight. All my crazy comes out at the sight of blood (mostly my own, but ESPECIALLY my son's), but Catherine? She is my own personal Valium.