Day of the Arm, Part 3 of 3

Elliot is okay.  This trilogy was not meant to induce suspense, dear reader.

Okay maybe a little suspense.  But James Bond-flavor suspense.  Will he escape from that devious trap?  Of course he will.  Will he rescue the girl?  Of course he will.  Will his arm get better and he'll grow up and pitch in the World Series?  Of course he will.

Furthermore--- as I'm sure the highly intelligent readers of this blog intuitively understand--- if Elliot did develop some kind of permanent arm problem, we would share it with you personally and individually.  (Except for those random fans who neither Hannah nor I know personally, like yesterday's visitor from Overland Park, Kansas.  You, Sir or Madam, will get your Elliot health news here on the blog.)

Anyway.  Back to our story.

We doped him up with Ibuprofen juice every six hours, as prescribed, but he still wasn't using the arm.  I'd been considering letting him go back to daycare if he was better, but when his arm still wasn't back to normal Thursday morning I agreed that I should just stay home and watch him.

When Hannah first left the house he wasn't using the arm at all.  I kept laying toys on his left side, and just like the night before, he would reach across his body to grab them with his right hand.  Even in situations like this he wouldn't use his left arm:

Is it just me who find that absolutely heartbreaking?

You may think I'm a sick puppy for spending all this time videotaping my temporarily disabled son.  But the point was to capture him using the left arm and then email the video to Hannah to make her feel better.  (I never actually managed to do that successfully, but it's the thought that counts.)


As the day went on, I noticed that he started using the left arm for a few seconds at a time.  When he got focused on a toy, it seemed like he would "forget" that he wasn't supposed to use that arm.  Then suddenly he would realize, and switch back to using only the right.

Here's what I think was happening:  he had Nursemaid's Elbow on Wednesday, and somewhere along the way it got popped back into place.  But there was residual soreness in the area, so when he moved the arm he got a few twinges of pain.  And even though the pain wasn't as bad as before, it was enough to make him stop using the arm.  That lasted Wednesday night and Thursday morning.

Ibuprofen has an anti-inflammatory effect, so as we gave him his 6-hourly squirts the swelling went down and the pain got less.  By mid-afternoon it was clear that function was coming back.  Here's one of the videos I took to try to reassure Hannah:

Eh voila!  By evening he was holding a bottle with both hands.  That's the non-suspenseful ending to our 24 hours of drama.  Thanks for reading.