Things that I learnt on Wednesday 6th May 2009 (and the days following)

1. A nineteen month old child tumbling from a dining room chair onto a wooden floor can cause very serious injury to himself.

2. When a child has been crying for longer than ten minutes, it is time for a closer inspection of his injuries.

3. When a child’s arm looks like it has two elbows, that is not a good thing.

4. Good friends, when called upon in a dire emergency, will come round extremely fast.

5. It is not hard to find a paramedic in the West End of Morecambe at any given time, nor in fact, to find two or three paramedic crews just waiting around at the end of a job ready for the next local emergency.

6. Having a broken child gets you a free ride through Morecambe and Lancaster in an ambulance, with flashing lights and a siren and everything.

7. Having a broken child gives you priority through all the other casualties and straight into x-ray.

8. Just falling from a height of one and a half feet can snap a forearm bone in half so that the ends overlap each other at strange angles, and will usually need surgery with pins in order to correct it.

9. Morphine does not have a dulling effect on toddlers – in fact, quite the opposite.

10. When a child can no longer feel pain, he forgets about broken bones and wants to adventure up and down hospital corridors.

11. Old men on stretchers do not like the noises produced by a baby bashing a plastic toy with a rattle over and over again.

12. Having a hyperactive and noisy child means you will be swiftly removed from the queuing corridor and into the treatment room.

13. Having plaster from the shoulder all the way down to the fingers is not a hindrance to the mobility of a determined enough child; in fact it can act as extra weaponry to wield away interfering parents.

14. Having a broken arm x-rayed and plastered are not pleasant experiences but are in no way as traumatic as having a name tag attached to a healthy arm, which can cause the patient to fly into such a rage that he will actually try and chew it off his own limb.

15. Children’s hospital wards have wonderful cots which can be used as pens safe havens against for poorly toddlers.

16. Spending the night in a hospital, then having nothing to eat or drink for two hours the next morning in sympathy for your pre-op child, along with the trepidation of walking him down to the unfamiliar bowels of the hospital theatre, even for a minor operation, can leave you shaking like a leaf.

17. Watching your child be anaesthetised in your arms is not the same as watching him fall asleep peacefully because his facial muscles collapse, making his eyes roll back in his head and his tongue loll out of the side of his mouth, which is a very nerve racking and unpleasant event.

18. Sometimes doctors can pleasantly surprise you by not doing surgery at all but discovering they can manipulate bones back together manually which means that a two hour ordeal only takes forty-five minutes.

19. Just because a child has had anaesthetic that morning, it does not necessarily mean that he will be drowsy or sleepy at all for the rest of the day.

20. A full length arm pot, a sling and the recent memory of a traumatic fall is not enough to stop a toddler racing up and down the stairs, wrestling with his brothers and climbing onto the table as soon as he gets home from the hospital.

21. Even if you ring up and beg, the orthopaedic department of a hospital will refuse to put other unbroken parts of a child’s body into a cast, even if you think their mobility should be reduced for their own safety.