4 stiches

 Sorry to leave you on a cliff hanger last night. Here’s the story of our Mother’s Day in A&E. 

It was Sunday and often we go to church but this morning we hadn’t and maybe this was God’s vengeance (jokes.) The day before we had actually tried out a new church, the church of our landlord. In the summer they meet outdoors and they always have food at the end. Percy commented that this more like how Jesus would have done church and since Jesus was always right, this was the correct kind of church. So if anyone is doing church another way you are definitely wrong. 

So Sunday morning was Mother’s Day in France, the boys gave me some cute cards they made and Dan went out to get pastries so I could have a cup of tea and a chaussure au pomme in bed. My Mother’s Day treat was ridding a horse, I’m not big into horses but I might have been if my parents had had infinite wealth. When I was around 12 I had two friends with horses, so I got to go on horse rides a bit and it was really fun. I don’t think I’ve done it as an adult, and I don’t have the time or money to do it regularly as a hobby but I really wanted to just have one horse ride as a treat. So Dan had booked it in for 4pm that day.

It was a beautiful day but the weather has not been very good in general in the spring here, I feel like England has done better than France this spring. Our house has no outside space, so I really wanted to get outside before the horse ride at 4. Normally when I suggest things like this the boys always say they want to stay in. Sometimes I try and argue that if they like being indoors so much we should move back to England where I can speak the language. What’s the point of being in France if we never get outside to explore all the great places there are here? But it was Mother’s Day so I didn’t have to do any persuading I just made them go because I get to choose.

We went to a place called Castelnou which is 15-20 mins away, but instead of going to the castle and the little village we went behind that to the hills that look over the castle. We were climbing up rocks to get to this viewpoint  and the boys were having a great time. 

Me and Dan were saying how we should do this more because the boys like it when they’re there. We took some photos at the view point and then went in another direction so we could get a view of the sea. Eric started running and then he tripped and screamed.

I looked at his knee and at first it wasn’t bleeding but it looked really weird because there was a chunk of flesh missing. As if he was made of plastercine and a pencil had scraped a chunk out of him. I actually looked on the ground for the missing bit of flesh but there wasn’t any. Then the blood came and Dan carried him back to the view point he was at before. 

We asked a woman for some tissues and then Dan ran down the hill to get the first aid kit we had in the car. Eric was very good, after the initial screaming he was pretty calm. When I looked at it again I felt a bit sick and dizzy I’ve never had that response before but I haven’t seen much stuff like that either. We cleaned and bandaged the knee and Dan carried him all the way down the hill. What a hero.

We had never been to french hospital before, but I have head good things about it. We had to go home to get Dan’s carte vital to prove he can get free health care. He actually has to pay and then claim back after but it’s not like America where I’m sure you would pay thousands of dollars which I think would make you risk not going in a situation like this. So we went and got the card and some food an Eric’s cuddly panda. And Dan took him while I stayed at home with Percy. Percy was a super lovely big brother it was his idea to get the panda, and he was really sweet with him. Eric was seen fairly quickly and got an anaesthetic injection in the knee so they could do the 4 stitches. He was there about 2 hours in total. And the cost which we should be able to claim back was 19 euros. How do you think that compares to the UK? Do you think the wait would be longer? After tea back at the house we went out again just to enjoy a bit more outside time while it was still nice and I swam in the lake.

The really sad thing is that we are going to Corsica on Thursday it was going to be a holiday full of swimming were staying in a little air bnb with a pool and we were planning trips to some beaches and wild swimming places that look amazing. But now he can’t get his leg wet! Gutted for him. I even bought a disposable underwater camera in anticipation of all the water based fun we were going to have. At the moment he can’t walk properly either, he won’t bend his knee so he kind of hobbled to school this morning. I hope he’ll have a bit more movement by the holiday on Thursday. 

Very thankful that we can use hospitals and we can stil go on our holiday and that it wasn’t more serious. But I hope he’ll have a great scar that he’s proud of. I started a facebook album a long time ago called “my worst injuries” and this will be the first photo of a new generation. So you know, that’s exciting. 

Hopefully I can ride a horse another day.

 Thanks for reading the whole saga!