Mom Talk

My sister and I went to visit our mom in the hospital today and left our kids at home with their respective daddies. When we got back to my sister’s apartment, we noticed that her 2-year-old son was not moving his right arm. It was just dangling uselessly at his side. Apparently, he’s been playing the “my chair!” game when people try to sit down and he dove underneath his dad as he was sitting down on the couch, causing daddy to sit on his elbow and hyper extend it. He was fine unless you tried to make him move his arm, then he got very fussy and wanted someone to “kiss it”.

There was some debate over whether he needed the ER and so I called a friend of mine who’s a nurse with a lot of experience in orthopedics and described the incident and his symptoms. She immediately called the injury “nursemaid’s elbow” and said it was basically a dislocation and he needed to have it reduced at the ER. We took him to the hospital and the nurse at the ER said she didn’t think it was nursemaid’s but they would do x-rays and have a doctor examine him. After 3 hours there and x-rays of his wrist and his elbow, the doctor came and said the x-rays were normal. She looked at his arm and said she thought it was nursemaid’s elbow (ahem, have I heard that somewhere before??). She told my sister she was going to make him cry a bit, then grabbed his arm and quickly popped it back in place. He did indeed cry for about a minute, then got a popsicle and began using his arm again! It was amazing. I called my nurse friend on the way home to tell her how smart she is.

A final note-if your child is ever diagnosed with this injury, it becomes more likely to happen again. They told us to make sure and tell anyone who’s playing with him until he’s about 4-years-old that they mustn’t pick him up by his arms or they will cause a recurrence.

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