Halle and X-Rays Don't Get Along

The night after I came home from getting my tetanus shot, I noticed that Halle refused to use her left leg. She would sit and cry or limp around without using her one leg. She screamed and cried the rest of the day and all night. She was also holding her ear all night crying so I figured she might have an ear infection as well. When morning came, she was still not using her leg.

I finally called and asked her doctor if I should be worried about it. He told me to bring her in. He first looked in her ears. I have to hold my ever so strong child down every time he looks in her ears because refuses to let him. After A LOT of screaming and me trying to pin her down, he has to clean her ear out because there is too much wax. Now if that's not embarrassing, I don't know what is. I swear I clean her ears out but that stuff grows overnight while she's sleeping, it seems like it anyway. He had to dig it out and found that there was a ball of it that was so hard and old and it was way in there, pushing on her eardrums, thus causing her pain. No ear infection though, yeah!

Trying to hold that girl down about killed me. She is so strong, no joke. The doctor commented on it multiple times. He said he remembered having to call 3 nurses in to hold Chloee down along with me, just so he could get a catheter in her. He said to me, "You have extremely strong girls. They are probably the strongest girls I've ever had to take care of as patients. No, scratch that, they are stronger than most of the boys that are their age too. Your girls sure now how to put up a good fight. Have you ever thought about putting them in a contact sport?" I said, "Like soccer, you mean?" He said, "More like Lacrosse." We had a good laugh about that.

He examined her leg and foot, then sent me upstairs to have x-rays done. I am sitting in the waiting room, Halle is screaming and I can't put her down because she won't use her foot. I am waiting and people who are checking in after me are going in before me and leaving before I even get in. The sign says that it is a first come first serve office. I keep waiting, with might I add a screaming baby, she never let up. I can only hold her with one arm because the other one is in throbbing pain from the tetanus shot the day before. She is screaming, I'm sweating and a man who is in the waiting room also, answers his phone and says, "Hold on, I can't hear you, there's this baby in here who won't stop crying" (glances over at me). Under my breath, I say, "You asshole!" A little old woman looks at me and can tell I'm either going to burst into uncontrollable tears or I am going to kill someone. She looks at me and says, "Men! They never understand. I am a grandma and a great-grandma and I know you aren't just sitting there pinching that child to make her cry just to see if she can annoy everyone in this waiting room. He thinks he's so important, having to take a phone call right now. I hope they call his name and he isn't here and misses his appointment." She put a huge smile on my face!!!

After 25 long minutes of Halle screaming uncontrollably, they call me back. I jokingly, but not joking said, "So what... did you guys call everyone else back before me because you didn't want to deal with a baby?" She answers, "Well yeah. We saw her age on the paperwork and none of us wanted to do a baby, they don't cooperate." "WHAT?" I said. She looked at me like, "Ooops, I shouldn't have said that, huh?" She was a moron.

We get back to the table. Chloee has to sit in another room. I put on the vest and Halle's vest. She instantly starts to scream as I lay her down. I have to hold her down and the nurse proceeds to keep getting mad and screaming at Halle, who is only one, and keeps telling her to hold still. I thought, "you do know that she doesn't understand you, right?". After lots of her screaming, turning, kicking and not cooperating, the nurse really starts getting mad. I lost it on her, I screamed at her and told her to get someone else to help with the x-ray. I told her to have someone else go out of the room and push the button. Duh, a baby isn't going to keep her foot still for 20 seconds while you run out and push the dumb button.

They pull her off and say that they'll just have to work and they'll be "good enough". Oh no, no, no.... I told them to get them perfect and that I wasn't going to leave until it was done right because I sure as hell wasn't going to come back up there and have it done again because the doctor couldn't read the x-ray because it was "good enough". Lots of glaring going on at me. I didn't care. I was covered in sweat. I had just waited for 25 minutes holding a screaming baby and then held down my child for 30 minutes while they were trying to get x-rays of her.

I was sweating everywhere. I think I started to have an anxiety attack. My armpits were soaking wet, 2 inches back from where my hair starts of my head was soaked in sweat. I had sweat dripping off my face. I walked back into the doctor, he took one look at me and said, "Are you okay? I mean, are you... okay? You look... not good!" I proceeded to tell him about my experience with the imaging people and he said they are awful and he's had other parents complain as well. He said he'd talk with them.

After this very long story, Halle did not have a break, fracture, or hairline fracture. He said that sometimes hairline fractures are missed in babies and don't show up for about 7-10 days. I guess their bones are more soft than even their ligaments and sometimes it takes a few days for it to show up on the x-ray. He said that he thought it was maybe a pulled ligament and to watch her and if she still isn't using it after 7 days to bring her back in. Of course, the very next day she was walking on it.