Worst Mother Of The Year
I am a horrible mother.
This morning at about 10:30 I had the girls in the bathtub and I went to squirt some of my Dr. Bronner's Baby-Mild Magic Soap spiked with Lavender essential oil (by me) and the pump to the soap dispenser was a little too enthusiastic about squirting and it completely missed the washcloth and went directly into Savannah's open eyes.
This is a bad bad thing.
I flushed her eye with water as much as I could for about three hours before I had freaked out enough over her screeching to put her in the car and take her directly to the pediatrician. I had thought about the ER but decided the pediatrician would be a better idea. She is already terrified of the hospital thanks to all of my experiences. Thankfully, they were very accomodating and took her right back and the doctor came right into the examining room behind us. I showed him the bottle that the soap came out of and the Lavender oil bottle. He said that it was a pretty mild soap and that it was probably less irritating than most liquid soaps. I knew that, that is why I bought it. It is all natural. Unfortunately it is not tear-free.
He put numbing drops in her eyes (amazingly enough without getting his own blackened) with help from me laying over her holding her arms and legs down with my body while holding her eye open for him. Then the process was repeated a few times while he kept trying to get some sort of yellow dye into them. Then he turned out the lights and turned on some sort of purple lightbulb tool and we held her down once again to hold her eyes open enough to see them glowing flourescent yellow/green back at us. She could also not see a thing out of the left one, which was the one that was swollen and hurting and now pretty much glazed glowy yellow.
He told me he thought that it would be okay and he prescribed some Erythromycin ointment to put into it and told me that if she started rubbing it that I would have to cover it with an eye patch. He wants to see her again first thing in the morning. I agreed as I fought back tears and listened to him tell me that "these things happen" and that I did the right thing and that it was going to be okay.
All she wanted from the start of this was to go to bed. She was in bed all afternoon in the dark. I think she dozed off a couple of times but every so often she would start screaming and crying again because it is stinging. She hasn't seemed to have gotten any better over the evening. She can't handle light and she won't uncover her eyes. Currently she is on her daddy's lap on the couch with her pink silk over her eyes, listening to cartoons. It is so sad.
I am sore now. She instinctively beat the hell out of me while I was holding her eye under a stream of cool water to flush it and holding her down for the doctor. She has the fight part of the "fight or flight" instinct down. Also, it's because I carried her forty-something pound butt around like a baby all day because I feel like the worst mother on the planet.
Posted by gwendolyn on April 18, 2003 at 07:18 PM