Dum Dum Doctors

I'm having a hard time getting my creative juices flowing, or any of my juices for that matter. I'm tired. It all started last night.....

{{{entering Saved By The Bell-type flashback sequence}}}

We went to my sister-in-law's house for mango sticky rice. Also for the company, but the mango sticky rice was the main thing. As groups of small children are wont to do, there was quite a bit of noise and rough-housing between my four children and her...one. It really wasn't ONLY my kids making the noise, but I digress. At one point someone produced two large inflated bouncy balls that I'm sure were manufactured for the purpose of an adult using them to sculpt their abs. Our children used them for the purpose of rolling face-first onto the carpet.

So consumed was I in the enjoyment of my mango sticky rice that I didn't see when Tess, apparently, rolled face-first into a tangled wad of children.  She screamed and cried. She refused to move her left arm. She refused to be soothed by my singing "Leafy Treetops" or my knock knock jokes. That's when I knew it was serious.

Fast forward two hours. DJ took Tess to Instacare whose motto is, "We'll pop your kid's bones back together so you don't have to!....for a small fee..." where he discovered that Tess had dislocated her elbow. The doctor popped it back in, it popped back out again, he popped it back in again, he gave Tess a Dum Dum, and DJ brought her home. She was still crying and refusing to use her arm when she got home, but we figured she was just being dramatic, so we spanked her and sent her to bed so that we could watch Smallville.

Not really.

In reality we were up most of the night with her, trying to pop her elbow back together the way the Dum Dum doctor showed my husband. She wimpered. She screamed. She cried herself to sleep a few times. At two in the morning DJ searched "how to pop an elbow back together" on YouTube. The only thing the videos resulted in was me getting nauseous.

Finally, the sun came up. Tess still wore her yellow Sunday dress, which was soaked in purple children's ibuprofen by that point. Her scrawny little arm just hung there like a ventriloquist doll arm, only less weird. I immediately drove her to our doctor, who is actually a physician's assistant, but it's okay because he's witty and has the drawer full of Dum Dums.

He popped her elbow back together and outfitted her with the smallest sling possible by today's technological standards. In my exhausted daze I mentioned offhandedly that the YouTube videos weren't at all helpful. This got a good laugh from the doctor who cracked some kind of "I got my medical degree from YouTube" joke. Like I said, witty. Usually in circumstances such as this I would respond by demanding my doctor's home phone number so that I could call in the event of another 2 AM not-quite-emergency-room-worthy moment, but he hadn't given us the Dum Dums yet.

He told me to leave the sling on Tess for 48 hours to give her elbow a chance to rest before she pops it back out again. "Looks like she's going to be wearing that dress a little while longer!" was his parting shot after he gave Tess her Dum Dums, and with a flurry of white lab coat and antiseptic he was gone.

Tess was happy.

In fact, she was riding such a Dum Dum high that it was hard for me to get a clear picture of her.

{{{Returning from Saved By The Bell flashback}}}

Now, Tess is catching up from her all nighter.

I'm so grateful that Tess is happy again I don't even care that her dress is layered with ibuprofen, ketchup, Dum Dum goo, and swingset grime and I can't take it off of her until tomorrow.

Yes I do.

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