Bump in the Night

I knew this day had to come. Our first visit to the Emergency Room with the Luke Man. In all the commotion of arriving home from the grocery store, Luke slammed his head into our coffee table. Rob ran to his aid, took one look and said he needed stitches. I freaked out because we were not signed up for any health care yet, so I examined it to find my little boy now had three distinct eye brows, two running parallel to each other. We rushed him to a clinic down the street. They cleaned and taped the wound but said it was bad enough that we would need to go to the Royal Victorian Infirmary (translation: hospital emergency room) to see a facial surgeon. This was beginning to sound serious and expensive (I know, I shouldn't have been thinking about money at a time like this, but at this point Luke had completely stopped crying and was acting like nothing had happened). I asked a nurse how they were going to bill us. He laughed at me and replied that all medical care is free in England, especially for a little child. That was a relief. So Harper and I sent the boys in a taxi to the Infirmary and I headed home to put her to bed. Rob and Luke spent the next few hours there. The doctors notified us that it was too deep to glue, so they would have to put him under and stitch it shut. They scheduled a operation room for him for the next morning and told us Luke would have to fast 8 hours leading up to the operation. Of course, Rob had school the next morning, so we all taxied to the infirmary and Rob left me with Harper strapped to my front and Luke in the stroller. Luckily (I say that in retrospect as I was furious at the time), the doctors examined Luke and concurred that it had healed enough over night that it wasn't worth exposing him to the risks of  anesthesia. So we have just been cleaning and making sure it stays closed with surgical stripes. Besides the initial moment of injury, it has not seemed to bother him at all and he continues to run through the house haphazardly without a care in the world. He has already almost recreated the same exact accident a few times. Needless to say, we have now moved the coffee table.