Parents, First Aid and Learning When to Go to the ER
There was a long thread yesterday about a kid whose father tried, unsuccessfully, to remove a BB from his 12-year-old son's scalp. It started a long, sometimes argumentative discussion. It got me thinking, too.
Times are different for a lot of people today who are parents, compared to when their parents or grandparents were raising their children. Parents used to do a lot of their own stuff when it came to minor injuries. Trips to the doctor's office were for things that were more serious and that couldn't be handled by Mom or Dad. Trips to a hospital emergency room were even more rare. Most households had a book on first aid somewhere, and it got consulted. Also, a lot of parents went through the Boy or Girl scouts and learned quite a bit of first aid stuff during that process. Even in the 60s, when I was in high school, I took a fairly extensive first aid course, which covered a lot of typical minor injuries and what to do about them. Some of the things I remember my parents doing for me when I was a kid in the 1950s included:
Removal of deeply-imbedded fish hooks.
Cleaning and debriding a badly skinned knee or elbow that had imbedded gravel, and then applying a gauze bandage and adhesive tape. That iodine stung like crazy. These were followed by a week or two of admonitions not to pick the scabs off.
Reducing a dislocated index finger while on a camping trip. "Here, let me see that," my father said. He pulled it straight out and it popped right back in place. I got the usual, "You should be more careful" lecture.
Homemade butterfly bandages cut from adhesive tape to close a nasty pocket knife cut that had a bit of a gape in it. Those had to stay on for a couple of days. My mom was good at that those, and they worked a treat.
Treatment of very bad sunburns with blistering. More "You should be more careful."
Blister draining. Lots of blister draining. Heat a needle in a match flame, insert at the edge of the blister and Bob's your uncle. Admonition: "Don't pull the skin off." We always did at some point.
Lancing of boils. Instant relief, and protected by a bandaid or gauze bandage.
They never did BB removal. We did that ourselves because we'd get in trouble.
I'm sure there were lots more things I don't remember.
Today, a lot parents take their kids to the ER or the Urgent Care for such things. At least parents with health insurance do. Other parents are still bandaging up and taking care of such minor things themselves. They can't afford to go to the Urgent Care or ER, unless a problem is a really serious one. The information is still out there on how to treat minor injuries, etc., and a lot of people, including grandma and the elder neighbors still know how to do that stuff.
On the other hand, when my wife recently got a boil on the back of her neck, I didn't drain it myself. I know how to do that, have done such things in the past, and could have done it, but we do have health insurance, and a general surgeon at our clinic did it for her. It's all healed now. It would have healed if I had done it, too, but I don't have to do that stuff, because we do have health insurance. The bill? $400. It took the Doctor five minutes, including injecting a local anesthetic.
We seek professional medical care much more often than our parents or grandparents did, in general. But, a lot of people are still treating their own minor stuff and can't afford to do it any other way. It still works, just like it used to. Those of us who are not fortunate enough to have health insurance coverage should probably not be too quick to judge people who are doing the same things our parents and grandparents did. Truly. Many minor injuries and such things can be safely treated at home, with no bad consequences. That hasn't changed.
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of the top of his foot and his ankle after a full day of kayaking on a river, speaking of blisters. He had not put sunscreen there (despite my warnings--he was 12 and applied his own sunscreen by then) and it was a pretty serious sunburn. It was at least two inches long and and inch wide. We got back to our camper, and I sterilized a steak knife and drained it and dressed it with our little first aid kit. It healed in a few days. It never occurred to me to take him for medical attention, but then it wasn't his head, either. My same son's friend had a nasty burn on his leg from the exhaust pipe of a little motor-bike thingie, his mom (a very nice lady, no one would ever think of her as a "bad mom"
waited a week and finally took him in when it still looked pretty bad and didn't seem to be healing well. I don't think any of that rises to the level of child abuse--UNTIL it's obviously serious, or extremely painful and/or disfiguring, and the parent still refuses to seek medical care.
