Our daughter had broken her arm. It happens. It’s an ordinary, everyday thing for us to ride to the emergency room (where we spent enough hours to learn the little-known fact that ER is actually now ED because it’s a whole department, not just a room). With all the color gone from her little 9-year-old face, I was pretty sure my own natural color was draining away, too. And really, does her arm have to hang in that lopsided position? It’s not natural. I didn’t realize a broken arm bled just a little at the point of impact. Was that a bad thing?

 

All of these thoughts and a thousand more raced through my brain as we hurried to the Emergency Department twenty-five minutes away. Interspersed between the ping-ping sound of text messages going to and from my phone. “She’s broken her arm. Please pray.” Also my own ongoing prayers– sometimes words specific to our current situation, but mostly a lot of Our Fathers and the Jesus Prayer. I’ve never been more thankful for rote prayers in my life.

 

So that was Sunday, and the wee hours of Monday morning. I should have realized the anesthesia they gave my daughter when they operated on her arm (apparently she’d suffered a compound fracture that required an operation) might have made us a little slap-happy, too. It’s normal to hear your young child tear up and tell you she’d said a prayer for the older woman in the ED room beside her, because she looked like she was having a stroke and she wanted God to be with her, yes? And when my husband returned with her prescribed antibiotic and codeine-laced Tylenol, he brought her a stuffed animal giraffe, muttering “It must be pretty bad if I’m giving you a stuffed animal, kid.” To go with the other 247 she has at home. It was all our version of the Twilight Zone.