OK - I promised the story of our weekend of toe drama or as I like to call it, This Little Piggy Went to the Slaughterhouse. It all started innocently enough. Some friends we met at cue camp invited us over for dinner. They live on a lake (jealous!) so while hot dogs were being cooked, the girls got in the water.

The Queen of Sheba held court and commanded all the adults while she languished in the cool, cool water,


and enjoyed every minute of it,


(She looks like a suicide bomber here, no?)



while The Dormouse was thrown from the dock by the KingofHearts,


and enjoyed every minute of that.



Then suddenly, drama ensued. As The Dormouse was swimming back to the dock and climbing out of the water for another bout of see how much you can scare all the women in attendance by throwing your daughter in the water, somehow she scraped her foot against one of the legs of the dock and got a splinter. But this was no ordinary splinter. This was the Mother of All Splinters. So as she crawled out of the water, dripping wet and screaming, we tried to calm her down to see what had happened. I did not have presence of mind to snap a photo (and maybe that's the final decision maker on whether or not I'm addicted to this blog) so allow me to illustrate:


How the splinter entered at the base of her toenail is beyond me, but it was in there good.

Our hostess was kind enough to lend us some tweezers, but it was wedged in there so far under the nail and it was wet to boot, so any chance of grabbing it with the tweezers and pulling it out fell by the wayside when little bits of the wet mess simply crumbled off every time we tried to get at it while The Dormouse screamed and yelled and protested the discussion about going to the hospital.

The Dormouse finally did calm down, but was still complaining of pain, so it became apparent to me that the only way that piece of wood was coming out was by lifting up her toenail, and despite my degree from mini-medical school, I didn't feel qualified to perform that kind of operation on my five year old. On me? That would have been fine, but not my five year old. So after much hemming and hawing and Google phoning, and then feeding everyone involved because it was three o'clock by then on a holiday weekend and no one had eaten and I knew if we went to an ER or an urgent care facility, we'd likely be sitting there for hours and on empty bellies that might make us all a teensy bit more cranky, we decided we'd better hit a local urgent care facility that we found open. We were also about forty miles from home and if we drove back to our neck of the woods, everything that was by some miracle open on a holiday weekend would surely be closed by the time we got home.

So we found a local urgent care facility and finally drove on over there, where we waited for two hours to be triaged and then the better part of another hour for treatment. Frankly, I felt that this was reasonable, given the holiday weekend and lateness of the hour and I was just happy that we got in there before five o'clock when they closed. It wasn't life threatening and I argued with myself that I was probably being stupid, but to wait until after labor day, I felt like was just too long. When I finally talked to the doctor and told her that I was waffling about coming in, she gave me the lecture of my life about algae and how infectious it is and how this wound already was showing signs of infection and I certainly had done the right thing by bringing her in immediately; in fact it would be the wrong thing to have waited. It's not often you get your parenting choices validated, so I'm calling this one a win.

In general, we were treated very well by all the staff at the urgent care and everyone was very nice, save one or two people who thought their skin rash was more important than the child who came in WITH A HEAD INJURY and didn't feel like that kid should have been placed in the line ahead of them because they were so clearly there first.

The doctor performed minor surgery in her office and cut out about a third of The Dormouse's toenail in order to remove the half inch splinter.


The quarter inch piece of wood left that wasn't destroyed in the process was placed in a specimen cup by the nurse who exclaimed, "IT'S HUUUUGE!" *pause* "Do you want it as a souvenir?" and then paraded around the office so everyone else could inspect.

"Want it?" I said somewhat incredulously.

"Sure. You know. To take to school. Show your friends at show and tell."

The Dormouse then decided that she could not live without her prize, so it was boxed up and came home with us.


We were discharged and I then went about getting a prescription for penicillin filled on a Sunday night at eight o'clock in a different state in which you intend to pick it up. Which, if you're even lucky enough to find a pharmacy that's open on the night before Labor Day, asking them to fill it there so you can pick it up in another facility in another state is like asking the pharmacist to strip off all her clothes and give you a lap dance right there in the drug store.

We couldn't fill the prescription on Labor Day either for obvious reasons, so when I went in this morning and they told me they didn't have enough to fill the entire prescription today, could I come back on Wednesday afternoon, I asked if they could just fill half of it now with what they do have and I'll pick up the rest later so I could get her started on it as soon as I could since the injury happened on Sunday.

The pharmacist looked at me like the uncaring mother I am and said, "Well, why didn't you fill the prescription on Sunday then?"

I countered with, "Because there wasn't a pharmacy IN THE ENTIRE STATE that would fill a prescription for me on the Sunday night before Labor Day. Were you open either yesterday or the day before?"

I guess that did the trick because she filled half of the prescription without another word and left me with orders to pick up the rest on Wednesday.

Digression: I also filled a prescription for the KingofHearts at the same time, which would have cost me $12.00 if I filed with insurance, but they would only give me four pills. (Not four weeks, that's four pills.) She informed me that if I didn't bother to file the prescription with insurance, I could get the entire prescription of twelve pills, for a grand total of $24.00. Yeeeeaaaaah. Health insurance in this country is JUUUUST FINE.

The Dormouse is doing fine, by the way, and she has a good story to tell in school today. Fortunately, she didn't have to do a whole big bandage thing on her toe and just a little band aid sufficed.


As soon as I put a clean band aid on her toe after her bath last night in plain view of The Caterpillar (mistake), The Caterpillar began crying and limping around the room, pulling up her pant leg and pointing at her toe.

So now she has a band aid too.


A sister will always share your pain with you.