Gimpy O'Neal

Yesterday I took the boys to a new park in a different neighborhood. Mommy was sick and tired of Turtle and Dolphin park. "You're sick, Mom?" asked Isaac. "No, buddy. SICK AND TIRED." We found yet another of the bazillion city parks here in town that advertise the presence of play structures. To our delight, this super-cool new one we found had not one, but TWO play structures, and also two sets of swings. The boys wore themselves out for about twenty minutes climbing up this strange 5-foot-high vertical thing that resembled a floppy ladder-wall. What was most amazing (but perhaps should not have been) was that Jacob could climb it without help. Mind you, I was standing right there with my hands hovering next to his sides the whole time he was scaling this contraption, but I was impressed.

The point to climbing this was to get to the slide at the top, which was both twisty and fast, an unusual combination. Jacob loves sliding, though I insist, as I did with his brother before him, that he go down a slide only while sitting on my lap. As we went down together for the hundredth time, his sneaker slipped slightly between my legs. Did I mention this was a fast slide? Before you could say "Holy Ace Bandage, Batman!", the tread on his sneaker caught against the plastic of the slide, causing his shoe to bend his ankle outward and to be dragged under my leg like that for several feet. Then he hurled his head backward in pain and bonked his skull on the side of the slide.

I saw he had twisted his ankle as I removed it from underneath me, but I didn't really think it was bad until I saw him limping, and then falling as his joint refused to support his weight. We played at the park for quite awhile longer to observe how bad it really was, with me schlepping him about when he got tired me wanting to test his ankle again. "Does it work now? How bout now? And now?" It didn't seem like it bugged him too badly at that point -- he was content when he wasn't trying to walk on it, and when he was, he seemed less like he was in pain and more like he was frustrated that he couldn't walk. Of course I looked at it, and it didn't look discolored in any way, though the swelling was anybody's guess because his cankles are already so fat.

At naptime I took them home and called the doctor, who suggested some rest and watchful waiting, but told me that, if he wasn't putting any weight on it by the next day, he should come in. Yesterday he actually seemed to enjoy his situation, since I commanded him to stay on my lap the entire afternoon and watch Thomas. The horror! But when he woke up this morning and wouldn't even try to walk on it, we went to the doctor.

To make a long story short, after an inconclusive half-hour at the doctor and about an hour-and-a-half at the radiologists' office (including an x-ray with so much screaming that it required a mommy and a technician to expose themselves to a minor amount of radiation), we now know conclusively that his ankle is neither broken nor sprained. His doctor suggested we wrap his ankle for a bit to help support it. RICE, anyone?

We visited good ol' Turtle and Dolphin park tonight to enjoy the weather and kill some time, and, while he still insisted I carry him from place to place, he crawled up steps by himself and even stood up a few times on his busted ankle. I think he's just using his gimpy status to get the chicks. "It's an old football injury, ladies."



Anyway, may you, like me, be struck by the ridiculousness of the situation. Here is the world's most mobile baby who nearly kills himself trying to fall off everything in our house daily, but it takes his mother and her infernal carelessness to actually cause serious injury.