I Called 911 Today

Yep, I did. Ok, actually it was yesterday.

I joined the millions of parents who have called 911 to freak out about something happening to their child. It must be some sort of rite of passage thing that you have to do.

I hope that was the last time I have to do that though!

What happened? Well, Sam wanted to see if she could fly. Yea, she found out she can’t.

Seriously though, she went lurching off our bed last night while we were getting ready for her bath. It was the freakiest thing ever. Looking at my baby smiling at me while she jumps forward into thin air and falls head first to the floor.

We have a really high bed too. Ok, it’s not that high. It’s about 3 feet. Waist level. I think it’s high. I would personally like a stepping stool to get into bed each night, but whatever.

She cried. Really loudly. I totally forget how exactly she landed as it’s all a blur but it was basically that lurch into mid-air, tilt downward, and land flat on her head thing. She kept crying. Dang, I don’t blame her at all!

The first thing I wanted to do was to call 911 though. I had this discussion with someone (maybe it was on my babyboard, or an article I read?) about brain injuries and how it’s really important to get your child checked out if they have a bad fall. I remember talking/reading about how waist level drops were ‘generally’ not that tramatic (mileage may vary, of course!) and let’s face it, how many kids had fell off the bed before? I dropped my brother out of a rocking chair (haha – the poor guy! I was 10 though!), Justin fell of the counter somehow (says his Momma)…

Anyway, even thought she was crying which is telling me that everything is working ok, and she can move all her limbs so nothing is broken or crazy… I thought I should call. So I did.

They didn’t help that much. ‘Help’ being reassuring me that my baby would be fine. They did answer fast though. That was nice. I’ve never called 911 before and sometimes you hear those news stories where people have horrible stories about them. Which is why they are on the news for it in the first place. Blah.

So, she transfered me to the fire department. I repeated again what happened and asked if there is anything I should look for. He basically said, they can come out here, we can go to ER, or we can watch her. Our choice. I realize it’s not his job to reassure me about all the things we should look for in our baby but it would have been nice to have a neat list that we could run down and check her out with. Then, of course, if something happened later they could be liable… It sucks we live in such a sue-happy world.

She was breathing, she was crying, nothing was broken though. Alright. So I got off the phone and calmed down a little. Then, I just got in bed with her and nursed her. Justin and I both laid down with her for awhile and checked her out again ten minutes later. We got out a flashlight to check and see if her eyes dialated and they did.

And she is totally fine today behaving very normally. 🙂 So that was our fun experience with 911. Sooooo hope we never have to do it again.