Yoga Helps Me through The Accident

For those of you who are parents of young children, I am sure you will be able to relate immediately to the situation I faced the other day.

We were at Science World, a wonderful, educational environment for everyone of all ages. My now two-year-old son and his father were playing at one of the exhibits when an accident occurred. My son put his arm into an opening on the top of a table at the same time as his father moved in the opposite direction.

A scream of pain from a voice that I know all too well caught my attention. By the time I looked up, his father had already pulled his arm out and was standing up. My son cried out for me, reaching only one arm towards me.

I could tell by the anguished look on his father’s face and the sound of my son’s cry that this was not just your regular “ouwy.” I took him into my arms and attempted to take his focus off his injury but that didn’t work. He has a very high pain tolerance so it concerned me when he flopped his head on my shoulder and began to whimper.

Not knowing if he was just tired because it was past his nap time or if he was truly still hurting, we decided to try and distract him by looking at other exhibits for another hour. All the while, he did not want to be put down, which is not like him at all.

The biggest tell tale sign that something was really wrong was that he didn’t even want me to kiss his “ouwy” better!

It was awful getting him into the car seat as he screamed in agony. When we got home, we then had to get him out again and put him in bed for his nap. He cried himself to sleep. Even though he is normally an active sleeper, this time he did not move at all during the 90 minutes of uneasy rest. While he slept, I checked his arm gently and as I did, he winced in his sleep but did not pull it away. He awoke crying and only moving one arm.

Needless to say, we were very concerned. Being a Sunday, the medical clinics were all closed by then so the only place we could take him to was the hospital emergency.

He was quite the trooper. He didn’t fuss unless we bumped or had to move his arm. Fortunately, the x-rays confirmed that there was no fracture and only soft tissue trauma.

Thank goodness for that. For the first time ever, he was given a little Tylenol as a pain reliever to take the edge off. He made a fast recovery within 48 hours. Phew…it was so difficult to watch my son feeling so helpless and not able to fully communicate to me exactly what was hurting and how much.

I know that my years of yoga and meditation have really grounded me so that I’m able to flow through these situations with ease. I now have much more trust in my ability to keep myself calm, which I know benefits him to the fullest. Children are so attuned to our energies and they will flow with us, breathe with us.

So you Moms and Dads out there, keep up the yoga, as it definitely supports us through our children’s journeys as well as our own.

[tags]trauma, children, injuries, meditation, calm, accident[/tags]