A mother’s sixth sense

As mums, we pick up many skills that we never, in our carefree childfree days, thought we might need. One such skill is being able to instantly deduce from the sound of your child’s cry – whether it’s volume, pitch or tone – the seriousness of a particular situation. Usually you listen with one ear while carrying on with the multitude of other tasks you are engaged in; sometimes you stop and listen and sometimes you drop everything and run.

 

Last Friday evening, my sister and I were just sitting down to dinner with a relaxing glass of wine, while the kids — my three and her twin three-year-old boys — were chasing each other around the house. The Dublin Cousins had arrived for the weekend that afternoon and they and their Cork Cousins were over-excited about being together and up past their usual bedtime. We had fed the kids and got them all into their jammies before we finally sat down to eat ourselves at about 8pm.

 

After yet another loud wail from the front room, I took no notice and continued to eat, thinking they were probably just fighting over a toy or something, but my sister dropped her fork and jumped up from the table straight away. She met one of her boys in the hall, blood pouring down his face and a very worried looking twin behind him.

 

He had fallen while running and hit his face off the corner of a glass-topped coffee table opening a deep gash above his right eyebrow. He was understandably hysterical at the sight of all the blood and fought us as we tried to put pressure on the wound and stop the bleeding. His little twin clutched his hand tightly to try and comfort him. The closeness of the bond between them was incredible to see.

 

And so we ended up in the local out-of-hours GP co-op half an hour later where we were first told by the female doctor that we would have to take the child to A&E for stitches, which was our worst fear. She then cleaned the wound and said it might be possible for them to glue it.

 

She called a male colleague in and he said it needed stitching, but then he also changed his mind and said maybe they could glue it. They hadn’t instilled much confidence in us at this stage. Confidence waned even more when they asked my already traumatised sister what she wanted to do and she suggested that being the doctors, they should probably make that decision.

 

The male doctor glued and steri-stripped the now distraught child while the female doctor, myself and my sister held him down on the table. His poor little twin was wedged underneath the table, listening to his brother calling constantly for him. Before we left, the doctor gave us a letter in case we needed to take him to A&E the next day.

 

When we checked the wound the following morning, it didn’t look good so I rang my own local GP surgery, one of the rare GP surgeries who do stitching, and we brought the little guy over. My own kids’ GP, a male doctor with young children of his own, was amazing. He put the child at ease straight away calling him Matt Man (his name is Matthew) and put myself and my sister at ease by explaining all of our options in detail.

 

He strongly advised against reopening a glued wound and said that we didn’t have to worry about infection as the wound was clean and if there was a scar, this could always be revised by a plastic surgeon down the line. We left feeling much happier than we had the previous night and Matt Man lived to fight another day.