Brynn's Little Finger

One of the things that I love, and occasionally that drives me nuts, about our little girls is how active she is. She’s not really a wind down kid, but more of a go go go, crash kids, which definitely has its really amusing moments, like when she used to fall asleep in her dinner, or on the floor in the middle of playing. It also gets Mike and I up and moving, taking her to the playground or to the beach more than we would if she was willing to sit still.

One of the downsides though, is that when she is climbing and running around and grabbing things, she also gets slivers.

I have to admit, I never really thought about this as an issue, but finding slivers on the tiny little finger of the constantly moving hand of a toddler who can’t tell you they have an ouchy is quite tricky. Needless to say, a couple of months ago, we missed one.

I say a couple of months because I can’t really be sure, but by the time we saw it, the whole pad part of the tip of her finger was filled with pus and the area around it was red. Compared to her finger, this was a huge area, but in actuality, it was maybe a ½ cm diameter circle. My guess was it was in there for maybe a couple of weeks.

In retrospect, Brynn had been chewing on that finger, but she had also been teething in the spot she was chewing on, which I assumed was why, in reality who knows.

In any case, Mike and I took her to the bathroom, lanced it, cleaned it out, soaked her hand in salt water for good measure, and put a bandaid on it. We had done this previously and it worked well, so we really didn’t think much of it, and we were positive that anything in there came out, because it was really pussy. So a couple of weeks went by and we were much more vigilant about slivers and found a few, but after about 3 weeks I noticed that her finger had not returned to normal. Three weeks seems like a really long time, but the only reason I noticed it at all was because a tiny little white dot had reappeared on the tip of her finger, but this time her finger was filled with fluid that we couldn’t get out. Also if you looked carefully at it under really bright light you could see it didn’t look quite like the other fingers, it was significantly different in size… you know, by about a 1/3 of a cm.

So we packed her off to the clinic, where the doctor looked at it and listened to what we told her. She said that was exactly what we were supposed to do and was surprised we had thought of the salt water bath, which was great, but unfortunately the infection was not going away, so it was time for antibiotics. I asked her if there was anything else we could do (because of course, for me it is less than ideal to give a 1 year old antibiotics) and she basically said, wait for it to get worse and then take her to the hospital for IV antibiotics, because clearly we had tried waiting, it was getting slowly worse and it didn’t feel like anything was in there, and the infection was not at the surface where we could deal with it topically.

I have to admit, I felt pretty bad. After all, I didn’t notice the infection until it was pretty big, and I didn’t notice it hadn’t gotten better for weeks… how could you not notice something like that for weeks! Geez.

So off we went to the pharmacy to get a liquid antibiotic that we spent an epic week (with daycare’s help) trying to give her 4 times a day on an empty stomach. At one point it brought the daycare director to tears because Brynn so didn’t want the medicine it took two people to get it in her and she felt like she was torturing her… in my case she would hold it in her mouth and psit it back out the second I moved away. But, we managed to survive the week and for the first time in almost two months Brynn’s finger is now back to the normal cute little shape and size it should be.

It also made me think, as much as I hated giving her antibiotics, we are pretty lucky that we have access to them and they work, otherwise, a missed sliver could be a much bigger deal.

Speaking of which, it’s sliver checking time.