Emergency Room Visit

Well, it seems Katrina had a fall at school this afternoon, which resulted in a dislocated right shoulder. She was rushed to the emergency room by her friend Chaz and while on-route, Katrina called Luann to tell her what happened. Luann immediately called me and then, we were both on our way.

When we got there, the shock she was in from the impact was wearing off and she was in serious pain. Since this was the second dislocation she has experienced (it was her right ankle about 2 years ago), we knew what to expect.

And this is Chaz, Katrina's friend whom brought her to the hospital. After his good deed, he was chewed out by his step-mother for offering to help us out with Katrina's injury. In spite of this, we are very thankful that she has friends like him around her.

This is a view of the aftermath of the "Closed Reduction" procedure. There were two doctors, one that had a sheet wrapped around Katrina's torso and he was pulling from her left side, while the orthopedic specialist had a sheet wrapped around her waist and Katrina's arm at the elbow. After carefully positioning her arm, they pulled away from each other rather methodically, and I could see that Katrina's shoulder had settled back into position. Of course, they gave her a strong sedative to ease the pain but she still made some groaning sounds during the procedure.

Here she is, sleeping off the effects of the sedative. Luann stepped out of the way while they worked on re-setting Katrina's arm. Yep, the sedative part of this episode is the most scary thing because they had us sign a paper, which states there is a risk of respiratory or cardiac arrest, before they would work on her.

When she came to, she had no recollection of the procedure, just the prep-work when they administered the sedative, then the point where we were putting the sling/brace on (I say 'we' because I had to help raise her up and then hold her wobbly head to keep it from flopping around). At this point, the follow-up X-ray showed that the reduction was successful, so they were taking her vital signs every 10 minutes and she is not far away from being discharged. All in all, the job was much quicker than her ankle dislocation and now she has to work on doing things with only one hand...

The most interesting thing about this is that Katrina didn't take the bus home, and had decided that she was going to linger around school for a while, then 'hitch' a ride from a fellow student named Bradley. Turns out, she didn't clear any of this with her mother or me, so when I found out she didn't take the bus home like she was supposed to, I couldn't help but to point out that if she didn't break protocol, it is very likely that this whole thing wouldn't have happened. Yeah, I'm real popular right now.... but the facts are the facts...