Another first

Now that Luigi is 3 years old he’s started asilo. I’ll admit I was rather torn about the whole thing. On the one hand I was feeling sentimental and not wanting my little boy to go away to school all day (it lasts from 9 am to 4 pm) but on the other hand I was looking forward to the chance to be able to get things done.

Even though he did go to asilo nido last year, which is for younger children and babies, going to school for a whole day was new to him. The other first for him was riding the school bus which, as you can probably imagine, was really exciting for him.

Children’s lives are full of firsts: first tooth, first word, first step, first trip to the emergency room. Yep, we had that first this year too. And, of course, it had to happen at one of the worst possible times, the day before a holiday – in this case, Ferragosto (August 15^th) when everyone heads out to the country for a picnic.

The morning before the big day, O was busy getting our house in the campagna ready for our family picnic while I was home with Luigi. As I was out on the balcony hanging out clothes, I heard him start crying and came in to see what was going on. Here he had decided to stick his finger in a hole in one of his toys and when he couldn’t get it out he pulled as hard as he could. The finger was red and a little swollen with a small scratch on the knuckle and he was telling me all about how the bad truck got his finger stuck. I wasn’t too concerned about it since he was moving it around. I cleaned it and put some ice on it and he went back to playing. A little while later I noticed it was continuing to swell so we put ice on it again. But, the swelling wasn’t going down.

Thinking that maybe I should put some medicine on it, we took him up to the guardia medica later in the afternoon to see if I could put some kind of cream on it. Since he’s so young I didn’t just want to slather something on there without an opinion so I took the names of two medicines I have in the house and the doctor told me either one was fine, to just put a tiny bit on it – 3 or 4 times a day.

As soon as I got home, I put the medicine on his finger and right before we went to O’s mom’s house for dinner, I put a little bit more on since it wasn’t getting any better. While we were there, Luigi starting shaking his hand and telling me it hurt. I kept an eye on it and noticed that it just kept swelling and swelling so back to the guardia medica we went.

This time it was a different doctor, who suggested we take him to the emergency room (just what we wanted to hear! Ugh) since he was afraid that the small scratch might have a tiny piece of plastic in it that was causing it to swell up.

By this time it was 10 pm so by the time we reached the hospital it was around 10:40. The absolute only good thing that occurred during the emergency room visit was the fact that they took him in a bit early due to his age. The ER doctor seemed to think we were lying when we said what happened although I can’t imagine what in the world he was thinking happened. He kept yelling at Luigi to stop crying which, of course, only made it worse. Then he made me give Luigi a suppository for the pain which made Luigi ask, “Why are you doing this to me?” (Just what a mom wants to hear). After a very unsatisfactory visit with the ER doctor, with O becoming increasingly redder in the face and me worrying that we’d see the ER doctor on the floor any minute, he sent us up to the Pediatric department.

There we didn’t get a much better reception at first until the doctor took a look at O’s face and saw he was about at the end of his patience. After several minutes of questioning and insisting that the scratch on Luigi’s finger was a bug bite (with me very forcefully saying that it was not), I finally mentioned that maybe it was the medicine that had caused it. It was not the first time I had mentioned the medicine. We had gone through the whole scenario several times with both doctors. Finally it was like a light bulb went off and she gave Luigi some medicine and a prescription to follow for a few days and we were headed back home.

All in all it was a very frustrating experience and not one that Luigi ever wants to go through again either.

There were two positive things though:

1 – The two visits to the guardia medica and the visit to the ER did not cost anything.

2 – The next day, the doctor at the guardia medica called me on the phone to see how Luigi was doing and find out what had happened – proof that there are still some people out there who care.

My poor little guy’s swollen hand