When the doctor matters more than the experience.

Well, it finally happened. After warning my kids approximately 200 times a day to stop doing something (climbing, jumping, fighting) or else “you’ll crack your head open” .... one of them actually cracked their head open.

So being the wise medical consumer that I am, I saw blood, immediately freaked the heck out, almost passed out, and told my husband to go straight to the ER. Since he’s much more calm in these scenarios, he decided we should go to our pediatrician first, who conveniently has Sunday hours.

The pediatrician sent us to the ER ?? This is where you all say “See? A mother’s intuition is always right”. It might also be when you say “You took a 2 year old with a bleeding head wound to a pediatrician’s office?” Yes. We did. And, yes. It was awkward. 

Ok, now here’s my point. We have 2 ERs in town. Before we went, our pediatrician called the one that is notoriously slow, usually rude, and typically has a waiting room full of bleeding, puking, and/or drunk clientele. 

We left and decided we’d definitely prefer to sit in the other one with our 2 year old. We got triaged right away and went to sit down in the leather club chair in front of the fireplace after we purchased a latte to get us through the ordeal. Are you getting my drift? The place is fancier. But, it is also lower cost. Yes, the fancier place overall, based on data, has lower cost. I look at the data every day. And to be fair, I've delivered my children in both hospitals and the one with the yuckier ER definitely has a nicer birthing suite.

Back to my point... the fancy ER decided that they'd start shaving my 2 year old's head to see what we were dealing with. WHOA. Wait, this isn't what the pediatrician said was going to happen. In fact, she thought (after speaking with the ER doctor), that they would glue her laceration. We explained this to Fancy Nurse, and she assured us that they would most definitely be stapling her head.... after shaving it.

My kids were basically bald until they were two. She barely has enough hair for a small, pathetic Pebbles-esque ponytail. And of course, if we need to shave her head for medical reasons, there are far worse scenarios I can imagine. But, that's not what our pediatrician said!

So, after lots of back and forth, and an already hour-long wait at Fancy ER, we decided to go down the street to Not-So-Fancy-ER. There was a man in the lobby in a verbal fight with a City Police officer as soon as we walked in. There was a woman who insisted on showing all the newcomers her finger that was hanging on just by a thin piece of skin. And, it became obvious that a toddler with a bleeding skull didn't rank very high on their list of priorities. We waited in the waiting room for over 2 hours while applying pressure. I started to question whether I overreacted and should have just stayed at the Fancy ER.

When we got called back, we met the ER Doctor. He was charismatic, surprisingly calm with all the drama going on around us, and somehow communicated with my child who was over it. He told us that he had 3 children and that he received his medical training in the military. He had seen combat - and even though my 2 year old's battle wound came from falling off a slide, he assured us he could handle it the same.

He applied a technique where he used her own hair to tie the wound together tight in little knots - and then used medical glue to hold it down. No staples or stitches. No shaved head. No follow up appointments to remove the aforementioned staples or stitches. It should also heal in a few days vs. a few weeks.

Before we left, I asked him why more doctors don't use this technique. His answer shouldn't have surprised me: They get paid more to do staples - and it's faster.

So, parent friends: sometimes the doctor matters more than the 2-hour waiting room experience. My little girl is running around the next morning with a princess dress, superhero cape, and a rainbow-hair barbie. Except for a weird, matted area of her hair, no one would be wiser to the very long day we had yesterday.