Hello, Shawn here. We had our first "parentally inflicted" traumatic moment with Nessa Friday evening. While out running some errands, I called Tami from the video store to see if she might be interested in a particular movie. She explained that she was a bit distracted: she had been trimming Nessa's fingernails (a job that seems to need doing about every 6 hours), and with only one nail left to go Nessa was getting fussy, so Tami clipped it quickly to be done. Only after Nessa screamed did Tami realize she'd cut too far and accidentally clipped Nessa's skin. When I called Nessa had calmed down, but Tami was still trying to stop the bleeding.
When I got home a bit later, Tami was still trying to stop the bleeding. She had tried putting a bandage on Nessa's thumb, but the thumb immediately went into Nessa's mouth and the bandage came off--not good. Not sure what else to do, Tami was holding a cloth wipe to Nessa's thumb to apply pressure and try to stop the blood. The cloth had blood spots all over it. There were also spots on one of Nessa's bibs and on one of her teddy bear's clothes--which made me realize we had a real problem.
After a quick discussion, I went and got two more bandages. One went over Nessa's thumb with the pad by the cut, and the other went around her thumb to hold the first bandage in place. By the time I had the second bandage on, the pad of the first one was mostly red. Now I was getting worried--how much blood does one little baby have? How much can she afford to lose? We had given her oral vitamin K in her first week of life to help her clotting, but didn't the midwife say that she would still be a bit vulnerable from 4 1/2 to 6 months? (Nessa will be 5 months old this week.)
To keep the bandages out of Nessa's mouth, I had also gotten two of her socks and put both of them over her hand. Given that Nessa produces approximately a gallon of drool per hour, we were still worried that she would put her hand in her mouth, soak through the socks, and the bandages would come loose. So Tami went and got two small mittens and put them both over the socks on Nessa's hand. Since the mittens were thicker than the socks, we figured it would take a lot of drool to soak all the way through. Meanwhile, Nessa was looking at us like we were crazy. (To be fair, we were a bit--with worry.)
Actually, the drool never had a chance. That many layers meant that Nessa could no longer get her hand in her mouth, so the bandages were safe. As you can see, Nessa was less than thrilled at losing the use of one hand, but Tami and I could put up with that.
Nessa slept Friday night with her hand covered. By Saturday morning, the cut had clotted and we could remove everything. Nessa was thrilled to be able once again to soak both hands equally through judicious application of saliva.
Tami felt (and still feels) terrible over this. I have been told that I have been assigned to Nessa fingernail clipping duty on a temporarily permanent basis. Nessa seems not to have been too psychologically scarred--I don't think this will be worth more than a month, at most, of therapy when she's an adult, maybe only a couple of weeks. She has seemed a little more tired this weekend, which naturally prompts thoughts of anemia and such, but she could just be having a growth spurt as well. (She gets these growth spurts every few weeks. I assume her brooks spurts will happen after she begins to talk...) In any case, we all came through the ordeal more or less OK, and life goes on.
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