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AUGUST 3, 2001
Look back and say "ouch!"
Remembering the injuries of summers past
by Terri Mauro
My kids have been in their respective camp situations for four weeks now, and the minor injuries are starting to show. My daughter has various new scratches and scrapes appearing on her legs on a daily basis, and dodgeball-related bruises as well. My son took a Frisbee to the face, giving him a nice big scab beside his right eye, and has at least one bruise on his leg from where boys allegedly pinched him. Childhood is a full-contact sport, and injury is inevitable.
Still, I suppose we're ahead of past summers in the injury-and-trauma department. There was the year my daughter dropped a bowling ball on her toe during a camp outing. The camp nurse swore there was no relation between the fact that my daughter's toe was bruised and swollen and the fact that she had dropped a bowling ball on it; mere coincidence, declared the nurse. Our pediatrician, on the other hand, looked at the toe and said it looked like someone had dropped a bowling ball on it.
Then there was the summer my son started with a seizure, after one overheated morning watching his sister cavort at soccer camp. That necessitated an emergency trip to the hospital, another visit for an EEG, much panic and anguish for Mom and Dad, and a delayed start to his own camp that year. When all was said and done, he was perfectly fine. Two years later, I'm still a little shaky.
My daughter's sprouting a fair amount of pimples on her sunburned little face this year, but nothing like the bizarre growth she had on her thumb one summer. It was big and puffy and green and filled with something that, if we were in a science fiction movie, would burst open and pour forth with little alien spawn. I think even the pediatrician was a little taken aback by it. Blecccch.
Thankfully, we've never had any broken bones. We have had head lice, a near drowning, various stitches, a small boy being kicked in the face by his swinging sister, and a scabbed knee picked at so relentlessly that there is now a scar to remember the injury by. We've been lucky, all in all.
Let's hope the luck holds for four more weeks until they're safely back in school.
copyright © 2001 by Terri Mauro