May 1991 and the summer was tough...

If pictures speak a thousand words... well, than these three kids have photos for us that would be stuff a thousand words wouldn't quite tell the story... I'll try to keep it as brief as is possible, that won't be likely.. first let me unfold the pictures and the story as it occurred.

May approximately Friday May 3rd, 1991 (I looked it up) I was to have helped my friend Lynn DeJong serve her catered dinner for the Bethel Church Mother Daughter Banquet in the evening. In the morning not long after Ashley had arrived at school for kindergarten, I got a call from the nurse that Ashley was in her office and in an extreme amount of pain and she was going to need to go home, "well what happened seemed like a normal question" and her response was that Ashley had bumped her upper leg on the corner of the desk and fell to the ground in pain and was unable to walk.. Now from Thomas Jefferson Elementary we lived 6 housing lots and a walk is how we normally got there, but now it seemed the car was necessary.. Not to mention I had to hustle two little boys into their car seats for this short trip.. are you with me here, I was rushing cuz Ashley was hurt and the boys weren't being overly in the 'be rushed' mood..

By the time I got the boys into the school nurses office, and saw Ashley laying there crying, I was too.. Well it was true that she couldn't walk, and I had to carry her to the car, thankfully the nurse helped by carrying Shane and holding Brian's hand to have them follow me. We drove back in the driveway and I told everyone to stay put and "Please DON'T GET OUT OF THE CAR", I'm going to call grandma, as I needed someone to watch the boys and then called the pediatrician Dr. Janet McCormick whom we were nearly on a 1st name basis with, we saw her so often for the next 5 years. Let them know that I was on my way in and would need a wheelchair to get Ashley up to the office. Why I didn't just go to ER, seemed that this was the faster route of getting her seen ASAP than the ER..  Threw that diaper bag together and bottle supplies, changes of clothes and off we headed..

Did I mention that this was waaaay before cell phones and so calling Greg hadn't occurred to me yet and he was somewhere out in the field as a hydraulic service mechanic unreachable if cell phones had been created.  I just hoped he wasn't in the middle of the ocean which was likely...

A whirlwind to get to the Pediatricians 2nd floor office, then a walk to the hospital from pediatricians with Ashley in wheelchair for xrays, waiting for results, phonecalls between dr offices, then calling me back at the hospital from a waiting room that she was going to need a bone scan as the xray showed a fracture in the upper right femur but it seemed more involved... the bone scan would give us those details.

Now I had to find her dad by phone through his office.. and call my mom to watch the boys longer.  We only yet begun.

The bone scan came back early afternoon that she had an egg sized cyst in the upper right femur and when she hit the desk it fractured what was left of it.. So from one phone call from the pediatrician to wait for the radiologist to meet with us, wait, phone call explanation of where to go next.  Yep, it looked like a perfectly shaped egg with only a fraction of a sliver of bone left on the sides, with a stripe going right across the middle like a crack..  Next stop, upstairs in the hospital to see Dr. Thornton who was on call, to have this full body cast for a broken femur put on for Ashley.

This was taken a month into it but it's the only decent "naked" picture that doesn't expose more than her cute tooshie..  sorry squirt should have put a black sensor over the toosh before scanning or a little red bow..

After she was encased in this casting material and we waited a little bit for it to be shaped and dry.. I then pushed her wheelchair back over to the pediatrician Dr. McCormicks office to return the wheelchair, and get the prescription for one of our own to pick up on the way home. Now you might be saying, "wow, that is quite a contraption" and you wouldn't know the HALF of it..

In this photo her brother Brian and Breanna DeJong are giving her some lovin' on the patio of our backyard.  Please take note of the plywood ramp in the right side of background... it will play a role in the later part of this saga.. We bought her larger skirts, shorts and jeans than her size and we cut the seams and installed velcro along those seams in order to get her in and out of clothes.. worked pretty slick and she still was a girl..  That bar across to keep the legs spaced a certain distance came in handy for lifting her and the weight of the cast from chair to bed or into the car.. She was no longer feather weight, she had moved up in the fighting division..

Nope that cast doesn't keep a VanEssen-Symens kid down.. she was rocking that swingset enjoying the circumstances anyway.. Notice her 'thumbs up' on the left hand.. that's my girl~!

Now the rest of the story should could go faster..

So Greg got a piece of sturdy lengthy plywood to get her wheelchair into the house and out of it while her leg was in the early stages of healing.  We also had to work UP to the point of being strong enough to carry her going up and down the steps yet..

But imagine the excitement on the 3 1/2 year old little boys mind that there is now a RAMP of any kind in his backyard.. and she doesn't need it all the time. So with his big wheel he made great fun and my heart stop as he would scream up onto it and spin around and come back down.. No amount of my asking, pleading, cajoling, begging him got him to stop.. and than it happened............

I was at work and my mom had come over to babysit at our house. Brian and Shane were in the backyard, Shane had walked up onto the wheelchair ramp (big wheel ramp if you asked Brian) and then Brian came whizzing up behind him, bumped him as there was really enough room for both of them, and head over keester Shane went down the side of the ramp.. Only Shane caught the nose flap that holds your nose to your face and well, basically slit it wide open.. I'm sitting down as I write this because had I been there.. I'd have fainted. All agree I couldn't have taken the sight of it or the amount of blood.  I got the call from Greg at the hospital, that my mom was watching the kids and that he had taken Shane to the hospital, he had stitches and NO, I shouldn't come, that he'd be home shortly..  At that time I was working the 4pm-9pm shift at UPS.. ugh, I swallowed hard, and just went home.. So this picture belongs to Shane for summer of 1991. Always a smile on his cute little face~!

So you might be asking by now, could anything else possibly fill our lives, and you'd think the answer would be No.. but I'm here to tell you that the story isn't quite over yet and we were an active family who would meet friends for lunch and sometimes it was at a park or at the local Burger King where they had an aparatus with a ball area at the bottom of it.. The kids loved it. 

I met Lynn and Breanna there one afternoon and all was well in Bellflower, great weather, being outdoors and enough fries to satisfy the 4 kids.  And then came the hollering from a familiar voice of Brian as he worked his way limping out of the balls to tell me his foot hurt.. it was obvious that he wasn't walking very well on it, even after the hugs, kisses, "you'll be okay" "rub some dirt on it" kind of speech figuring it would just work itself out as he got back to playing.  But that didn't seem to clear up the later it got.  I do believe that I took it seriously just not to the point of thinking a Dr needed to be called in on this yet. So I picked up the sitter, headed to the office and explained the dilema to Greg that night when he called. Of course Brian had already given him the blow by blow description to dad when he came home.  He was still limping on it.

The next morning, I call the pediatrician.. do you remember we know her by Janet in this month of never ending stuff.. holy cow.. nothing has changed with the above mentioned story. Still have one in a body cast, one with his nose stitched up, how I dare I go out in public with them is a question we asked ourselves quite often and without witnesses other than myself or the kids CPS mght have been brought in.  

After the at home schooling tutor had left for Ashley to finish school year at home,  it was time for a morning trip to the pediatrician to look at the right foot of Brian.



Yep, this is where it ended up, a green stick fracture of his middle two toes.  Basically in someone his size the bone didn't break just bent from the pressure of what appears to be a jump into the ball pit at Burger King (short on balls to support a child against the cross support bars).  4 weeks or so in this brightly colored cast of his choosing the color was the prognosis..

Now I think we will just stay at home and color in coloring books, so as to not make a scene with the staring we drew the attention of..

Okay, whew.. thanks for reading.. glad they eventually did grow out of this stage, but there are plenty of blog material left in those pictures..