Spring Break 2008

Spring break started with a bang - in David's eye.

We had a great Monday. Dave had his first visit with the eye doctor due to some observations by his teacher, his grandmother and me that he might be struggling with his vision. So, we started the day bright and early with a visit to Dr. Tonya. David did great, and picked out a pair of glasses that he'll wear as needed in the classroom.

Anybody want to lay bets as to how long the first pair lasts? We have the destruction category as well as the, "Mom, I lost my glasses!" category. Any takers?

Dr. Tonya numbed and dilated his eyes as well, just to get that exam out of the way. All clear.

It just so happens that Daniel is good friends with Dr. Tonya's son, Mason, so we'd planned to bring him home from the doctor's office for a spring break play day. The three boys joined forces with a couple kids from up the street and spent most of the day outside, doing boy things.

They made movies of themselves on their skateboards, jumping ramps and falling over. They skated all over the neighborhood. Intermittment games of Guitar Hero broke the monotony, as well as pizza and an entire gallon of milk.

They uploaded their videos on youtube and laughed at themselves, hysterically.

They ate some more.

And then they decided to get out the golf clubs their dad had given to them. And break things.

Keep in mind that I learned this all after the fact.

About 6:00 p.m., David came in - not crying, but not happy. "Mom, I got something in my eye."

Questioning led to the discovery that they were breaking bricks with the golf clubs. One shattered, quite effectively, and shards flew into David's face.

We flushed his eye out as best we could, and the fun continued (though the brick breaking stopped).

About 10:00, David came back to me. His eye was really bothering him. As we tried to flush it out again, he became inconsolable. It was obvious that it really, really hurt. He wouldn't even let me approach him to rinse it.

So we went to see the doctor. The ER wait was miraculously short, and all in all the experience wasn't awful. David was in a lot of pain, but he handled it well.

Diagnosis: corneal abrasion. He probably didn't rinse all of the brick shards out of his eye after the initial problem, and in rubbing it later, he injured himself. The doc numbed his eye, took a look and then gave us a prescription for eye drop antibiotics and Tylenol with codeine. We had to drive around a bit to get to the all-night pharmacy, but we made it back home by 1:30 a.m. I was wired and didn't get to sleep for a while, but David was out cold. That codeine worked wonders.

About 24 hours later, he was fine.

Did you know that 'codeine' breaks the 'i before e except after c' rule? Hmmm. Live and learn.