He is DEFINITELY a West, or The Long of It

I better start by giving a little family history. My husband's family to be specific. Branson is one of six children. All six of them have had between three and four broken bones each. That's a lot of visits to the ER for one family and doesn't even count all the visits for stitches. So, we weren't really surprised that it happened to us. Our own kids are young and we have a little bit of history of our own. Shortly after Caden turned three he was bouncing on my bed and fell off. We were pretty sure it was broken. It was a close call, but turned out he was ok (he just wore a splint for a week then we took him back to primaries for more x rays and they decided it wasn't broken).

Tuesday evening I was just starting to feel better from the stomach flu. I peeled myself off my bed and went into the kitchen to serve up some dinner. All my boys were in the living room. Caden and Brecken were playing and Branson was making phone calls. Suddenly I heard Brecken screaming, which is fairly normal so I wasn't too worried, especially since I know Brans wasin there with them. Brecken's screaming increased and it was not just the "I want to get Caden in trouble" scream. It's was an "Oh my gosh this hurts like no other" scream. Branson said, "Leah, you better come look at this." I went into the living room and saw this:

Something is definitely wrong with that picture (that's his elbow). I kind of freaked out, "Oh my gosh, what do we do? What do we do?" Brans was nice and calm and told me,"Calm down it's just a broken arm, he'll be ok. I have some experience with broken bones." After a quick blessing and a little ibuprofen we loaded Brecken up and I headed to the closest ER, a mere 30 minute drive from our house.

At the ER they could see his arm was obviously broken so they let us skip triage and took a straight back to a room. After a little morphine Brecken was doing much better. The x-rays showed he broke the bone clean off about an inch above his elbow. They said it was too complex to just set so they sent us to Primary Children's Hospital for surgery. Brecken was getting pretty tired by this time, it was about 9pm, he fell asleep in the car on our way to Primary's.

We spent about two hours in a little room in the Emergency dept waiting for our turn for surgery. Brecken was so tired he kept asking the nurses to turn out the light every time they came in to check on him. He fell asleep about 11pm and at 1:30 am they came to take him up to the operating room. They tried waking him up before the surgery but he was just too tired. Surgery only lasted about 45 min. The doctor put three pins in to hold the little piece of bone in place. Here is my sweet little guy post operation. He only woke up long enough to smile at the nurse and was back out again.

We finally got to our room for the night, where I could finally get some sleep at about 3:30 am. My little guy looked so tiny and angelic in that big hospital bed.

Here he is in the morning just before getting discharged. He was quite grumpy and didn't have a smile for the camera. His pain meds hadn't quite kicked in yet and he was tired. He got to keep the cool Fireman build a bear and the froggy blanket.

Brecken was such a trooper through the whole ordeal. He barely complained and all the nurses fell in love with him when he would say Thank You in his little squeaky "pathetic me" voice. We got home from the hospital about noon on Wed. That night at about 2 am he and Caden came down with the stomach flu. Poor little guys. Here they are Thursday morning recuperating on the couch:

And that is the Long of It.