"The hip bone's connected to the leg bone ..."

Labor Day, yeah, the day before school.

The six-year-old was running from the master bath into the master bedroom and jumping onto our bed. I was in the bathroom getting cleaned up and Jeff was laying on the bed.

Kenny ran and jumped a couple of times even though we told him to stop. Chris was underfoot, alternately following after Kenny and getting out of his way.

According to Kenny, Chris fell in front of him and he moved suddenly to avoid running him over. Jeff and I remember it differently: Kenny got off-balance and knocked Chris over. In any event, Kenny hit the wood door frame with his open left palm and cried. He cried more than usual, so I figured something was wrong. He cradled his left arm in his right. I made a sling out of a crib sheet and he eventually wandered downstairs with me.

The sling was uncomfortable so I removed it and rested his left hand on a pillow. I told Jeff to take him to the emergency room. It was shaping up into a classic "last day before school starts, end of summer" fiasco.

But, to my surprise, the doctor said, "No fracture. Take Tylenol for the pain." and she taped his pinkie and ring finger together. Soon he had the tape removed. He complained to his teacher on Tuesday morning that his pinkie hurt. I said, "Yeah, but it's not broken. We checked." That's the last that we spoke of it.

Until Friday morning when the hospital called. A radiologist had taken a second look at the X-rays and detected an oblique, nondisplaced fracture of the 4th metacarpal. He said it was palm-side, below the first knuckle. He said that it needed to be splinted and that Kenny needed to see an orthopedist. He recommended a nearby practice to me but they don't take our insurance. So, I called my son's pediatrician and got another recommendation. The soonest appointment was Tuesday morning. I was tempted to return to the emergency room for treatment!

I arranged to pick up the X-rays on Monday morning. Centrastate is a film-less facility so they gave me a CD ROM with about 100 files on it. Most of the files are html Help files but it wasn't hard to find the .jpgs in the Data/EXP00000 directory. I copied these files to my computer and even sent some over to Target for prints.

The doctor's office on Tuesday was fine. We waited in the examination room for a very long time. The doctor admitted that they couldn't pull the X-rays off the CD ROM but he treated Kenny based on a printed note from the radiologist that accompanied the X-rays and Kenny's reaction to pressure in the affected area of his hand. I would have helped them get the images off the CD ROM if it would have meant better treatment for my son.

The orthopedist didn't hesitate to place a cast on Kenny's left hand. Kenny was anxious to show his friends at school. I let him bring in the X-ray prints from Target too for "show & tell". Kids adapt well to this sort of thing. He doesn't have any trouble doing the things he always does, including handling the TV's remote control. He said, "I can't play XBox with my hand broken." Oh, he probably could but we won't tell him that.

And when I tell people which hospital was initially involved, they shake their head knowingly. "Tsk, tsk, tsk."