Two ER visits and a near miss

The hospital gave Brayden several Thomas the Train toys that fortunately work with our train set.

This weekend has been a little traumatic for Braydo. Friday morning Brayden took a thermarest camping mattress and built a bridge between his bed and Caleb's bed and was racing matchbox cars on it. Than he decided he could run across it. I heard one of those crashes where you run, not walk, to find out what is going on and found out Brayden had smashed his face into the side of his bed and it hurt really bad. A couple minutes later his speech became really slurred and he couldn't shut his jaw and the right side of his face where he hit started swelling. At that point I got worried that he might have broken something and I knew I wasn't going to be great at handling it with the amount of sleep I had gotten the night before, so I called Mike and made him come home. We took Brayden to the pediatrician who sent Mike and Brayden to the ER. After an x-ray and a cat scan, they decided he had a broken mandible and a dislocated TMJ joint. They re-set the dislocated joint and said the broke bone would heal on its own. They discharged him the next morning, he came home and by the afternoon he was back in the ER because his bone had popped out again. We thought for sure they would have to wire his jaw shut, which freaked Brayden out, but they reset the bone again, and said they would try again to go without wiring it. We brought him home and this morning he started throwing up and couldn't keep anything down. We called the on-call nurse and she said if things didn't improve by the afternoon we had to take him back in. Fortunately after a little nap (and a priesthood blessing) he was able to keep down sprite and by evening he was back on his soft-food diet. Thus far his jaw is staying in place and feeling much better. We are grateful for priesthood blessings, prayers, family, good friends, and a really tough little boy who took this like a man.

One of the more tender moments this weekend for me was that the ENT we saw Friday night seemed annoyed to be there on a Friday night and not really wanting to spend much time or energy making sure Brayden was getting the best care. When we took Brayden back to the hospital on Saturday we prayed that the doctor that saw Brayden would feel a lot of compassion for him and would care more about giving him the best care than his personal time. We had the same doctor we did the night before, but the difference in attitude was amazing. At one point he flat out said that he was going to take a different route than most doctors because he wanted this to be the best for Brayden. He said it could take a lot more of his time, but he wasn't worried about that. I love that the spirit can touch people when they are not even aware of it.

Now I just have to try and keep a house full of boys calm enough that Brayden's jaw can actually mend properly. I think we might be investing in some new board games or something.