Mommy, Kiss My Boo-Boo Finger

About eighteen years ago I received an emergency phone call at work from my daughter’s pre-school.  Before I even heard the first words of the caller I could hear my daughter’s high-pitched screams in the background.  I had never heard my daughter in that kind of pain, yet her voice was immediately recognizable to me.  Interestingly, my son, who was four doors down from where she had her accident also recognized his sister’s pain with absolute certainty.  It was quiet time in his classroom, but he bolted up and ran out the door in the direction of his sister’s voice.

It was a freak accident.  The one-to-two year old children had been outside in the secured, fenced-in playground enjoying the late morning son.  The teacher was counting heads as the kids streamed back inside.  My little girl loved the outdoors; as soon as she came in she doubled back out to the playground.  She was hiding and giggling playfully on the back side of the door.  No one new she was there when they closed the heavy fire door, catching her right index finger in the gap behind the hinges.

I dropped everything at work and ran out of the office, hoping I could find my way to a hospital to which I had never been.  There in the emergency room I found my baby cycling in and out of pain and terror under the supervision of the pre-school administrator; the triage nurses were unimpressed by her injuries because she was not spewing blood.  It was a full two hours after I arrived before we were finally invited to an examination room.

When they brought me the x-ray of her finger I could not believe my eyes.  Between her first and second knuckle the bone was crushed into dust.  The hand surgeon shook her head, confessing that she did not know whether she could save the finger. 

My daughter had had a mid-morning snack, so the hospital insisted that we wait a full six hours before they could anesthetize her for surgery.  The well-meaning nurses kept bringing me food; I could not bring myself to eat in front of my starving daughter.  I stretched out on the exam table and held my daughter on my chest close to my heartbeat, hoping to calm her to sleep.  She would cry herself to sleep for ten or fifteen minutes, then the pain would slowly wake her again.  

At long last, it was time for surgery.  This hospital had no pediatric facilities; we had to carry her down to the operating prep room in our arms.  They took every precaution not to terrify the baby:  no needles, no tubes, no restraints.  The anesthesiologist brought her a green liquid in a small sipping cup.  She gulped it down, becoming instantly intoxicated.   We transferred her to the doctor’s arms where she giggled and waved bye-bye to us over his shoulder as he carried her away. 

It was three long hours before we were called down to recovery.  We found our little baby in an agitated state, trying in vain to shake a big cast she did not understand off her arm.  The hand surgeon explained that she operated from the top of the finger because all of the nerves were on the finger-tip side; she was hopeful that the blood supply would return and that the finger would remain viable.

My daughter is home from college this week, catching up on her favorite girlie things, like manicures and pedicures.  She stretched her hands on the table before me, her ten fingers long like her father’s.   It would take careful scrutiny to detect the many tiny scars along the top of her right index finger, or the slight asymmetry compared with the corresponding finger on the other hand.  Her piano teacher did not notice any irregularity in nine years of lessons.  Her figure skating coach loved the expression she conjured with her hands on the ice.  She has a vice-like grip on her sabre while she fences.   The only lasting side-effect of her trauma is that she writes left-handed.

As parents we all want to protect our children from harm.   Although this trauma occurred on someone else’s watch, I suffered years of guilt over the circumstances that landed my baby in that daycare.  I see her scars and remember the months with her “boo-boo finger” buddy-taped to its neighbor, the tiny girl in her high chair adapting to a new method of dexterity for picking up individual Cheerios.  Fortunately, children are resilient—sometimes more so than we are ourselves. She sees her finger as an anecdote in a fascinating life, a reminder that when life hits you with hard knocks you fight back harder.  She is not scarred for life; rather, she is ready for it.

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