Head banging is bad for you

Thursday afternoon, 3.15pm and I am stood where I am always stood at that precise time; outside Joseph’s school door, waiting for the ‘pips’ to sound the end of the school day. We (myself and other parents) can see our children file out of their classroom and line up behind the glass door, waiting for their teacher to call their names as she spies individual parents.

I am spotted, she calls his name and I smile as he makes his way through the crowd towards me. When my smile is not returned, as always, you know straight away that something is wrong.

“What’s wrong Poops?”

He looks down, not sure whether to laugh or cry and replies, “nothing”.

“Tell me what’s wrong” I repeat and as I do, my eyes find what his are looking down at.

A sticker on the front of his jumper. It reads:

“Please keep an eye on me. I bumped my head today”.

I ask him what happened - he says he can’t remember.
Did he cry? He says he did.
What did he hit his head on? He thinks it was the floor.
Did he “have a little sleep” after he hit it? He can’t remember.

There were a few too many ‘can’t remembers’ for my liking so I take him home and to cut a long story short, within half an hour he goes completely grey, claps his hand over his mouth and runs to the bathroom. He retches but is not sick. He sits on the floor, complains of being dizzy and feeling sick and his eyes roll around wildly.

This is more than enough for me – I call the GP and they say bring him straight down.

They were great. They saw him immediately and seemed quite concerned but told me to take him home, let him lie down and to let him sleep but be sure to rouse him before we went to bed.

No problem.

We leave, get in the car and he immediately falls into a deep sleep. Of course, when he twitches in his sleep and he HASN’T hurt his head, that’s fine. When he twitches in his sleep and he HAS hurt his head, I’m a mess.

We get him home and put him to bed, worrying about him but we needn’t have. An hour and a half later he was awake and complaining of being starving and “could I make him a sandwich please”.

As soon as he mentions being hungry, we know that he is fine.

He goes back to sleep, wakes up this morning and not only starts his ‘word writing’ that we have not confronted all week (our fault) but also finishes it, thus not requiring us to write a letter to his teacher explaining why it wasn’t done!

Phew!

Thanks Poops. Mind your noggin next time though ok?