trauma drama

Harvey got stung by a bee this afternoon—a wasp, actually—and he ran around yelling at the top of his lungs for several minutes. He was pretty much running away from us, actually, since whenever he gets hurt he has a pathological fear that we're going to try and do something to him and it's going to make it worse. I suppose distrust of medical authority is transmitted genetically. This boy will suffer with a splinter in his foot for days rather than let someone take it out, and you've never seen a child like band-aids less. In this case we eventually got some baking soda on him, and after half an hour of intermittent yelling (we tried very hard not to laugh when he was crying, "Ow, Ow!") and an hour and a half of Japanese cinema, he was prepared to reenter the world of the able-bodied.

We did some research on the Schmidt Pain Index while he writhed, but unfortunately in our haste to aide him immediately after the sting we let the culprit fly away unobserved, so we weren't able to precisely quantify the pain he was suffering. It's often hard to tell with a preschooler. Sometimes when Zion "hits" him you'd think from the sound that he'd just suffered an axe wound. But I think Leah was correct to say that this was probably the most painful thing he's ever experienced, so we're glad he's ok now.

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