Not The Best Way To Start A Week

We were all going full throttle this morning, getting ready for work, school and preschool, and I was feeling pretty smug (my first mistake) about being slightly ahead of schedule. Everyone was dressed and we were just waiting for the last child to come down, when I heard an agonised yell. I had just answered the door to my friend whose son we take to school in the mornings so I didn’t go immediately. I knew it was Scooby shouting but I still didn’t go. I thought of all those times I had heard him shriek and dropped what I was doing and shot up the stairs prepared for an emergency, only to find him simply struggling to get a sock on or shouting at Rocky for invading his room. So I waited, finished saying goodbye, and shut the door. As I did I heard a ‘thud thud boom’ from the top floor. I ran up to see what had been dropped.

There at the bottom of the top flight of stairs was Scooby, with his face down and his body curled up  shuddering over and over with a seizure. I rolled him over and into my arms and his face was covered in blood. He hadn’t lost consciousness but he had no control over his movements and was gulping in air and blood and spluttering it back out again. I yelled for Richard until he came with a towel to soak it up and just had to keep whispering in Scooby’s ear to try and calm him down so he could stop convulsing. The more upset he became, the worse it got, but eventually he calmed down enough for the jerking to slow down. When he was still and I managed to wipe his face, we could see the blood was coming from his nose which was swelling up and turning purple. He began moaning and trying to talk so I tried to calm him down again but by this time I was blubbering too and mouthing to Richard ‘I think it’s broken,’ and ‘WHY didn’t I come up sooner?’ so it took us both a while to calm down. We couldn’t move him until the effects of the seizure had worn off and he could move his fingers and toes again so we knew nothing else was broken. It felt like forever.

Richard scooped him up and took him off to hospital in his van while I carried on shaking and crying and trying to hide it while I finished getting the others ready. I rang the school and explained that we would be late and eventually managed to get my act together to remember lunch boxes, PE kits and everything else that we needed.

Monday morning is now my free slot in the week, which means three separate drop offs to get all the kiddos to where they need to be. I was twenty minutes late at each stop which meant I had to explain it three times, but I only burst into tears at the first one, over a nice classroom assistant when she asked what had happened. After dropping Rocky off at preschool I took Baby to the childminders and only as I got there did I realised that I had now talked to several people but hadn’t yet wiped the spattered blood off my face and neck. What a nice picture that was.

When I got home an hour and a half later after the incident, Richard rang me to tell me he had finally arrived at the hospital after being stuck in town for over an hour and then he’d had to park far from the hospital as the car park was overflowing. He’d carried Scooby, who was no longer bleeding but still couldn’t move properly, through the town centre to get there.

The next phone report, an hour later, was a much better one. After waiting in the reception for a while, Scooby had suddenly decided that he was feeling much better and began to whirl round in the play area doing what he called ‘A Tap-dancing Dance of Joy’. By the time he went in to the doctor, he was asked how he felt and he sang chirpily ‘I feel GREAT!’ So after a quick check up, they were very satisfied that his nose, and everything else, was unbroken and he was fine to go home. Richard left the place feeling like a fraud, which in my opinion, is the best way to leave a hospital.

Scooby has carried on being very jovial for the rest of the day – indeed, the highlight seemed to be the fact that Richard had bought him a bottle of Cherry Coke from the hospital and he couldn’t wait to share some with his brothers when they each came home.

I took him with me to do the school run so he could show off his war wound.

‘Is it very red?’ he asked me as we got back in the car, as so many people had commented on his swollen and battered nose.

‘I’ll show you,’ I said, and pulled down the mirror on the passenger side.

He inspected it, then pushed the mirror back up and said, as if he was a casual observer of the whole incident; ‘I don’t think I want to look at it anymore now. It looks very painful, doesn't it?’