Hurt Leg
During the middle of the week where my 5 year old son C has soccer, he has been saying his leg is hurting. We usually skip the sessions because I want to take his word at face value, but my wife recognized the irony. She was saying how he may be faking it to get out of soccer and maybe it’s a possibility, but I don’t want to risk it.
One morning recently, C woke up and was unable to stand up. He was saying his leg hurt at night after crawling into bed with my wife. She was thinking he didn’t want to get ready and wanted us to help him. I recognized he wasn’t playing and told him to stay put. I helped him use the restroom and get dressed because he couldn’t stand up to get his clothes from his drawers.
His leg was really hurting and I told my wife we should keep him home from school. I didn’t want him running around and making it worse because C cannot keep still. He wouldn’t be able to help himself if he saw his friends running around. He ended up staying home and then I went to work.
In the middle of the day, my wife got paranoid and took him to urgent care to get his leg checked out because it was getting worse. C had to get his blood drawn, went through a round of X-rays, and a few other tests. They spent a few hours at the urgent care facility and ultimately, he has some sort of crazy infection that starts in the upper part of the leg and is migrating downwards. There was inflammation in his leg and it would take a few weeks to fully clear.
I was worried as my wife was giving me updates throughout the day. It also sounded crazy to me that an infection could cause leg pain, but here we were. He didn’t get any other medication other than to take some Motrin and call it a day. When his leg was hurting, we needed to give that to him.
C was such a trooper and he earned a bear for being the cutest and best patient while he was there. I guess the nurses thought he was so cute and well behaved even though he was going through a lot. He loves that bear now and wanted to sleep with it the first night. Hopefully this passes quickly, but it feels like wack-a-mole with so many things going on at once. Guess he wasn’t faking it and this is also a lesson to trust your kids because if you keep doubting them, you’ll miss something that needs more attention!
