Busyknitter

One thing I’ve learned this week is how easy it is to both over and under-react when one of the kids takes a tumble.

On Tuesday, T managed to daze himself a bit doing somersaults on our bed. With autistic children, it’s harder than normal to tell how serious an incident is. All I had to go on was the squiffy look in his eyes, the strange way he was carrying one of his shoulders and the horrible howling racket he was making. My snap judgement was that he had hurt his neck and so I called an ambulance. Fifteen minutes later I found myself sheepishly facing a couple of bemused and underemployed paramedics, while T tootled about the room obviously perfectly all right.

This afternoon I took the boys for a bike ride in Dunsop Valley in the Forest of Bowland. A really lovely spot for a family bike ride; a three-mile long tarmacced private road leading along a gentle river valley to a waterworks. Beautiful scenery, easy cycling and no cars. Dunsop Bridge, the village at the beginning of the ride has a top-notch swing park, lots of car parking and a village green with hundreds of overfed ducks. Absolutely perfect.

At one point, S swerved to avoid some walkers, lost control of the bike and ended up sprawled on the ground.Now, much as I love him, it has to be said that S has always been a bit of a wimp physically. So when he screamed, I found myself feeling more annoyance than sympathy. He had a couple of scratches on his elbow and hand. But seemed able to extend both his arms and wiggle his fingers. So I decided he was OK and ordered him back on his bike.

Half an hour later when not only had he not got back on his bike, he was refusing even to push it, I was beginning to think that maybe something was up. The main problem we had was getting back to the car, as we really were in the middle of nowhere and Mr BK was at home enjoying his day off from the kids. I tried pushing both bikes together, but that was not easy, especially as I had T attached to mine in his trailer. Then I did a relay for a while riding my bike for a couple of hundred yards and then going back and fetching S’s bike. The boy, meanwhile, was looking paler and more miserable by the minute. Just then a couple of elderly ladies turned up and helped wheel the bikes back to the car park.

It took twenty minutes to rig up the bike carrier, an hour to drive home to deposit T with hubby and a further 2o minutes to get to the hospital. At one point I thought S was going to pass out, but by the time we’d got there he’d perked upa bit . A&E was full of sporting injuries and there were at least two other kids who’d come off their bikes - it’s always like that on Saturday afternoons apparantly . The triage nurse said he had a banana arm, ie it looked a bit bent. So S was X-rayed almost immediately and half an hour later a junior doctor was showing us the transparancies of his right wrist with two clear fractures on it.

So it’s plaster for 4 weeks, no PE or swimming and how the hell is he going to do his school work? Bit of a bugger seeing as handwriting is his big learning support issue.

And I’ve been spending the rest of the day apologising to S for being such a mean cow to him when he first fell over.