We were sitting around talking last night at work. Another barely sick kid was in room 4 and it got us on the subject. I have a lot of kids and, in my many years of parenting only used the ER once, when my son split his sinuses open crashing into a dumpster on his bike, and required emergency surgery.
Then I realized, as a child, I had never been to the ER. When I was six years old I went head first falling off a bike while we were visiting family friends. I was knocked out for several minutes, I was later told. They brought me inside, I was bleeding, I remember waking up in my Mom's friend's arms, they were wiping blood off me. Then, they brought me over to their other friend's doctor husband's office and he stitched me up in the office, 5 stitches in my cheek and my chin too. He did a darned good job of it too, I don't have a scar. No head CT, they didn't have that back in 1964. I wore bandages over half my face for a week, I looked like a mummy.
When did people start going to ERs for totally stupid reasons? My mother would have never thought of bringing us to the ER for the sniffles.
