Visit to casualty

I'm writing less about J these days for two reasons: 1) he's getting older and is entitled to his privacy and 2) sometimes he reads my blog. I've just asked his permission to write about what happened that caused us to spend Sunday afternoon in casualty and he shrugged and said 'Don't mind'.

At school there has been another boy bothering him and on Tuesday while J was waiting to go into his music lesson he grabbed him, picked him up and then dropped him so his chin hit his shoulder. Nice. His and our main concern was about his teeth which hurt a bit but they seemed to be ok and otherwise he seemed alright. Then he got this illness and chest pain thing. On Saturday afternoon the pain in his chest localised in his ribs and suddenly we thought 'Boy picking him up. Pain in chest. Connection?' On Sunday the pain got worse and he was still short of breath so I called the emergency doctor who said take him to A&E to get checked out. So off we went. The receptionist went into a bit of a panic when we said 'chest pain' and thought 'cardiac arrest' but the nurse said 'Don't be silly' or words to that effect. So we sat in the paediatric waiting area among all the babies and toddlers with our 6 footer.

The staff were really nice. They dosed him up with painkillers after which he was able to get a good peak flow reading and did some other tests. They concluded that he has an injury to his ribs - bruised, possibly cracked but as his lung function tests were normal they weren't going to do an x ray so just give him painkillers. They were making all these jokes about how doing some washing up or ironing would help and next time just kick the bully and I was saying no way you get 'sanctioned' if you do that sort of thing. There was all this really loud laughter coming out of the room as we opened the door and the people in the waiting room looked at us in astonishment.

Anyway he's gone back to school today, suitably drugged up and seems to be ok. SAid it hurt a bit when painkillers wore off. Will have to miss cross-country running - he's devastated (not).