Remember four weeks ago when Tanner actually needed medical intervention? When he split his scalp open after a particularly effective head-banging episode? I took him to the Emergency Room because he had a laceration which I couldn't ignore (actually two nice, deep, bloody wounds to his noggin). We spent three long hours in a little room before anybody even touched him. Then after several "I'll be right back" statements from the ER doctor, four fresh and young medical people entered the room, burrito wrapped Tanner, and then a wide-eyed medical resident put six staples in Tanner's scalp; effectively sealing the wounds. Well, I didn't actually expect them to "probe" the wounds since the boy is, at his best, uncooperative. I asked if I could remove the staples myself, after a week, since I am a brave medical person myself and they let me leave with the handy staple remover gadget.
One week later I dutifully removed one staple at a time over the course of a couple of days (it was hard to get a good grip on a moving target). Curiously, there was still a rather large lump in one of Tanner's lacerations. I figured it was just healing tissue. Two weeks later there was something hard but small at the edge of the healed scar. I would push on it tenderly as Tanner laid on my lap as he went off to sleep. Soon I figured I would pick at him a little with tweezers or another pokey instrument but I could never get a good enough grip on whatever the "hard" thing was. Dave was curious as well and picked at the boy's head for over a week. Finally, a month after staples, Dave pulled out a sizable piece of chunky, hard plastic buried inside Tanner's scalp. The foreign object was obviously from some toy and not from the wall which I originally thought to be the culprit of the original injury. I am still at a loss as to where the orange piece of plastic came from.
