This morning Quinn woke up and complained his finger was hurting. No big shock there since by then the ibuprofen would have worn off. The problem was the bruising looked worse under the nail. I had originally planned on going in to work some today, but that quickly changed as we scheduled a doctor's appointment for Quinn.
Luckily there was very little traffic this morning since it was foggy and there were reports of black ice on the roads. The doctor's office is inside the beltway and we barely had enough time to get there (because I was running late getting ready). At the doctor's office they looked at the finger and decided that it was probably fine, and the nail root looked to be okay, but they wanted to relieve some of the pressure the blood was putting under the nail by cutting through the nail.
At this point I envisioned her coming back with some cordless drill with a long drill bit, revving it a couple of times and going to town on his finger. Needless to say I was a bit surprised when she came back in with what looked like one of the smallest screwdrivers I've seen that had a special drill tip on it. She simply set it on the nail and rotated it left and right with very little pressure until it had cut through the nail and some blood started coming through the small hole it produced. Quinn was fantastic and never moved or complained. The funny thing was Catherine was watching and when the blood came through I could hear her whisper to Ginger "That was so cool." Then the doctor basically treated Quinn's finger like a zit and kept squeezing it in various ways to get all the blood out from under the nail. You could tell Quinn would occasionally feel a bit of discomfort from the squeezing, but he still never really made a sound or complained (I did see him mouth some silent "Ows" during the process).
Later Quinn told me I wasn't the only one that had a misconception about what the doctor was going to do. He told us "I was a little scared at first. I thought she was going to come back with a hammer and a nail." Obviously he had heard her talking about his fingernail as just a nail and made a leap about what was going to happen. To his credit though, even when he thought that he didn't seem anxious or anything.
They've got him on some anti biotic or something for the next week or so. And for the next couple of days he's suppose to soak his hand in warm water four times throughout day to keep the hole in the nail open. During soaking he's been allowed to watch some television so he thinks this is one of the best things that's ever happened. I did make a comment to Ginger that I hope he doesn't decide to close his finger in the door again intentionally just so he can watch TV.
Figured I would throw in a couple of pictures of this morning's fog just for fun.
4 comments:
A tiny screw, huh? Interesting. When Tyler had his toe incident, the puncture device was like a battery-powered soldering iron. Doc turned it on, and burned through the nail, with wisps of smoke from the burning nail wafting up into the atmosphere.
He's recovered though; his toe looks normal now, and he no longer cries when I try to clip that toenail.
Yea, I remembered you telling me about that incident and how traumatic it was, which is part of the reason I was expecting something much worse.
maybe he won't lose the nail now, but as bad as it looks, I bet he still does. So I didn't see in your blog.. I guess it's not broken?
Yea, the doctor said that since he was able to bend it and wasn't complaining about it being in constant pain that it probably wasn't fractured.
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