Another trip to the ER

Bryce was prepared to take his GCSE test in biology on Wednesday. It was scheduled to start in the afternoon. But during break time Bryce and his friends were tossing around a rugby ball when they collided going after a ball and Bryce came up the loser.

It looked like Bryce had dislocated his ring finger so the school promptly took Bryce to the Emergency room in Stamford.


When Jeanne met up with Bryce he was just waiting for an x-ray. It came back with a fracture at the base of the finger.



When Bryce curled his finger his ring finger would twist over. That meant it needed to be straightened. They gave laughing gas during the procedure. He's smiling in this picture but Jeanne stopped taking pictures when they started to work. It was very painful. But Bryce was an incredibly brave kid.


Sometimes there are moments as a parent where you wish for anything to make it better but you can't, and then you look again at the situation and realize how much your "child" has matured and are proud.

After another x-ray we were told that we would need to go to a fracture clinic next week. That's the UK heath system over here! It was further complicated because we were to leave for Ireland for mid-term break.

But a miracle occurred when there happened to be an orthopedic doctor was AT the hospital (it was his clinic day), AND they had purposely half-booked his schedule with easy patients because his fellow doctor was out at a conference. SO... the doctor had lots of free time to see Bryce. The funny thing was that the nurses wouldn't have even asked if the doctor could see Bryce if Jeanne hadn't said that we were going to have to cancel our trip to Ireland. Then the nurses tried extra hard to work something out. YEA!!!!

We went into the office and after looking at the second x-rays the doctor then asked Bryce "how brave are you?" Which meant he needed to pull, tug and bend his finger some more. After much pain Bryce had a much straighter finger that didn't twist when bent.

The teacher who had chaperoned Bryce was required to do so because she had to vouch that Bryce hadn't received any text messages or met anyone who passed information about the test that was to be given. Weird but we won't complain because she was extremely helpful and nice. As they say over here..."no worries".

To top it all off Bryce left the hospital in a blaze of glory...the teacher who brought him had a convertible and put the top down. Bryce obviously felt very cool. We (Jeanne, Grandma and Sarah Rodman) watched Bryce drive off with his good fist punching up in the air shouting "YEAH!"

On the way back to school he told the teacher "I don't want to come here again, but if I do, I want you to bring me!"

:-)