Nursemaid’s Elbow: A $75 Lesson

Today has been one of those days. nbsp;I had a post in the works that was supposed to be finished, edited and posted by noon. {iOr at least during nap time}nbsp;/ibr /ibr //ibr /Before getting to that post, I decided to take a little Mommy-time and watch an older episode of Army Wives on Netflix. i{Looooooove Netflix!!}/inbsp;I shooed my kids to the basement and had my 12 year old keep an eye on her brothers (8 and 2). i{We are practicing babysitting skills.}nbsp;/ibr /ibr //ibr /About 40 minutes later, I get a phone call from my daughter i{we were in the same house, but I was btwo /bfloors away}/inbsp;telling me the baby boy is cranky all of the sudden. nbsp;I glanced at the clock to see it was nearing nap time and headed downstairs to make lunch. nbsp;I opened the basement door and called the crew up and was surprised that my toddler wasn’t the first to appear. nbsp;My daughter was carrying up a whiny little boy, but it didn’t sound like a tired whine. nbsp;As I took him from her, he started crying like he was hurt.br /br /I quickly asked if he fell or hurt himself and she gave me a surprised look and said, “No, I don’t think so.” As I moved to the couch to try to assess the problem I started my probing questions, “Did he fall off the couch? Did he trip over a toy?” I noticed he was guarding his left arm while saying, “Hurt arm.”br /br /*My older son told me he was getting his brother out of Daddy’s office by pulling his arms and sliding him across the floor i{ahhhhh…boys…}./ibr /br /I felt all the joints and noticed there was no swelling, but he was still crying out when I would try to move his arm. nbsp;We got him some ice and called Nurse Daddy. We decided to head out to our chiropractor’s office since A) He has an x-ray machine and B) If he dislocated something it could get popped back in. nbsp;Nurse Daddy met us there.br /br /After some poking and prodding and lots of medical speak by Nurse Daddy and Chiropractor we decided to take him to the ER. nbsp;Chiropractor didn’t have a digital x-ray thingy i{or something like that}/i.br /br /a href=”http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8rHTIsOHXLA/Temry3DOXGI/AAAAAAAAAaI/M7OxJsLY4fw/s1600/emergencyroom.jpg” imageanchor=”1″ style=”clear: right; display: inline !important; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;”img border=”0″ height=”133″ src=”http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8rHTIsOHXLA/Temry3DOXGI/AAAAAAAAAaI/M7OxJsLY4fw/s200/emergencyroom.jpg” width=”200″ //aNurse Daddy and I dropped off the two older siblings at home and headed to the ER in the hopes we wouldn’t be waiting there for hours.br /br /br /Fortunately, there were not many people and we got back to a room pretty quickly. nbsp;Our toddler laid on the bed with his blanky and paci while I had a flashback to 6 years earlier of a similar scenario with our older son. After 30 minutes our toddler suddenly started acting normal. He got up, didn’t want his comforts and wanted to get down and explore. bnbsp;He acted like nothing was wrong!/bbr /br /Nurse Daddy checked his arm again and he was moving it with ease and not wincing as he was just a few minutes prior. The doctor had not been in at all! nbsp;I asked my husband if we should leave because obviously he was miraculously cured.br /br /As we gathered all our things, the doctor came in. nbsp;We explained that he was acting normal and the doctor said, “Sounds like he had a href=”http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0001978/”Nursemaid’s Elbow/a.” br /br /Basically it is a dislocation of a bone in the elbow that is very common in children under 5. nbsp;They get it when the child is pulled to hard by the hand or wrist i{see * above.}nbsp;/ibr /br /i/iBecause it seems my toddler is a pro at readjusting his own dislocations, the doctor said we were free to leave. nbsp;However, we would have to wait for a rep to come in and register us i{that’s code for even though we didn’t have to do anything, you’re still going to have to pay for it.}nbsp;/iShe came in, got our insurance info and then I went to pay the $75nbsp;copay for no services rendered.br /br /After 3 kids and multiple ER visits with our older son, I am surprised we have never heard of this “common” dislocation issue. I guess my youngest wanted us learn something new in our parental journey. nbsp;He definitely succeeded.br /a href=”http://www.aghdesigns.com/images/blogs/siggy4.png” target=”_blank”img alt=”Anna” border=”0″ src=”http://www.aghdesigns.com/images/blogs/siggy4.png” //a