Emmett had an accident today and busted his chin wide open. This happened about 45 minutes before we were supposed to see Dr. Patti. 

If you have any experience with kids on the #Autism spectrum, you know that a trip to the emergency room for stitches is not something that’s gonna go well.

What should be an easy decision to go to the hospital becomes a huge decision that can have very serious consequences.

Emmett would be absolutely traumatized by the experience and we wanted to avoid that if at all possible.  Not only would Emmett be deeply impacted but we would be devastated to put him through that. 

This was heartbreaking for a number of reasons. 

First of all, Emmett was in pain.  I hate any of my kids to be in pain.

However, for me, the worst was how he kept apologizing for hurting himself and getting blood everywhere. He kept saying, I’m sorry Daddy, I’m so so sorry.

Talk about heartbreaking.  It was awful.  He apologized over and over again.  Each time Lizze and I would tell him that he didn’t do anything wrong and he has nothing to be sorry about.

Finally, I decided to tell him that we forgive him.  Forgive him for what? I don’t know.  I just thought maybe he needed to hear that. 

Anyway, I decided that we could probably avoid the hospital if I could butterfly the wound and he would leave it alone.  I ended up breaking out my retired paramedic skills and fixing his chin myself, with the help of Lizze and my mom.

I cleaned it and applied sterile strips to close the wound.  Finally we applied a Perry the Platypus bandaid to his chin to cover it all up.

Special bandaids always make things better. 

We were able to make it to see Dr.  Patti, which was very important to Emmett.

When we got home, the patch job had started to fail so I took a different approach. 

I cleaned it again and this time used and antiseptic version of a liquid bandaid. Unfortunately, it burned a little bit but it did the job of sealing it up and keeping it clean. 

Hopefully, that’s enough. 

In my experience, this should be just fine.  We’ll just have to keep an eye on it. 
Thankfully I had experience and training in this type of thing so that I could help him to avoid the trauma of the hospital. 

If all my training lead to this one moment.  Everything I went through to gain that knowledge was worth it to be able to spare my son with #Autism, a trip to the hospital.

Everything about the hospital is screaming overstimulation.