On Friday, January 30, Aaron and I were trying to get the kids out the door so he could take Waylon to daycare, and Avalon was going to go visit her classroom where she was supposed to start the following Monday. As Aaron carried Avalon into the dining room, she grabbed his coffee and burned her hand and wrist (from the splash). I wont go into every detail, but it was awful for all of us. We made our first parental call to 9-1-1 and ended up at the local ER. Luckily they referred us to the UCI burn center, who then admitted Avalon to the hospital. She and I had to stay overnight in the Pediatric ICU. We learned that they take burns on the hand much more seriously than anywhere else on the body because you can lose the use of your hand if it does not heal properly.
Avalon was an absolute trooper through everything, and once they placed the bio-brain (basically a collagen glove) over her burn, and she got some pain meds, she was back to her happy little self. Unfortunatley, it took a lot longer for Aaron and I to recover. We even had the added drama of being reported to child services, which the hospital is required to do for all scald burns. After years working at the Children's Court, it was very surreal to be on the other side of a social worker's evaluation. Although they made it very clear it was just a formality, it was one more layer of issues that made it the most intense 24-hours of my life.
Avalon was discharged on Saturday afternoon with a full bandage. The doctors were very optimistic about her recovery. We had to return to the burn clinic frequently, and she was not allowed to start daycare until the bio-brain fell off, which took 2 weeks. She is now almost completely healed and you cannot tell anything happened unless you look very closely. We have to be extremely careful to keep her hand out of the sun or covered in sunblock for the next year, but otherwise things are back to normal, relatively speaking.
Baby Girl in the hospital. She had tons of different monitors hooked up to her, including one that glowed on her toe, which she desperately wanted to pull off.
Here is Avalon's bandage just after she returned from the hospital. It went to the middle of her upper-arm. It really threw off her balance, and ticked her off because it made crawling almost impossible.
Although she was frustrated that she could not crawl, she was still very happy.
About a week after the "incident," and much happier with her smaller bandage.
As the days went by, Avalon became much more adept at maneuvering with her bandage on.
Just before the bandage came off.
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