Broken Elbow

Early yesterday morning (and I mean really early), Addison climbed into bed with me, complaining that her arm hurt.  Zuke and I both inspected it, and found nothing wrong.  She was moving it, and couldn't seem to pinpoint where it supposedly hurt, so we both figured that maybe she'd just slept on it funny.  She calmed down, and went back to bed with no argument.  A couple other times throughout the day, Addison would complain here and there about her arm, but I still couldn't find anything wrong with it.

Later that evening, Tyler and I got back from his baseball game around 7:30.  Zuke told me that Addison had fallen asleep on her bed, fully clothed, which she typically does when she wants to avoid cleaning her room.  Not two minutes after I walked in the door, I heard her screaming downstairs.  I went to calm her down and help her put her pajamas on, and noticed that her elbow was swollen.  She wouldn't straighten her arm, or bend it past 45 degrees.  I brought her upstairs, and Zuke and I decided we'd better take her in to get it looked at.

Once we got to the instacare (the second one, by the way), they got us right in.  The medical assistant and two nurses were all amazingly nice, and seemed to be quite amused by Addison's antics.  The doctor was also amazingly kind, and Addison did not seem scared or intimidated by him like she tends to do.  I will say, though, that having the x-rays done on her arm was 5 minutes of torture.  She had to position her arm in ways that made her scream, and then hold it there while the x-ray was taken.  Ugh.

When the doctor came back into the room, he looked at the x-rays for about two seconds, and then excused himself to go make a phone call to a consulting doctor.  When he came back in, he told us that it seems like Addison has an occult fracture in her elbow.  He explained that the swelling was coming from fatty tissue and blood, caused by a fracture, but that the x-ray wasn't really showing where the fracture was.  I was a bit confused by all of it, but he told us that if we took her to the pediatrician in a week or so, an x-ray should show new bone calcification and then we could see where the fracture was.  So for now, she is in a splint, and we'll head to the pediatrician next Thursday to see if we can tell how badly it really is hurt.  The best we can guess is that she must have fallen out of bed or something that morning, and just landed on her elbow funny.  Addison is such a trooper, though.  She is still going full steam, and not letting it slow her down at all!