So what the hell is “nursemaid’s elbow,” you ask? I wish I didn’t know, but I had experience with it first hand last weekend. Hubby was walking back from the playground with the Bean on Saturday, when she decided she wanted to run into our neighbor’s yard. He was holding her hand, and pulled on her in the other direction to come home. Well, she started crying and saying “arm, arm!” over and over. Pointed to her forearm and rubbed it and said it hurt. He brought her inside and we looked her over but she seemed fine – it obviously wasn’t broken, she could still use it (although she seemed reluctant to do so). It was almost bedtime, so we decided to wait and see and take her to urgent care on Sunday if it wasn’t better.

Sunday morning she was still complaining and wouldn’t use her left arm at all, so we got an appointment at the Kaiser urgent care center in Falls Church, and took her in. She was in a really good mood, other than favoring her arm! The doctor took one look at her and said “nursemaid’s elbow.” This is a condition that occurs in exactly the circumstances we experienced – adult pulls one way, child pulls another. This causes the elbow to become sort of dislocated, in a way (it only happens to little kids because their ligaments are much stretchier than those of old farts like us). This explanation is a little easier to understand than the heavily-clinical Wikipedia article linked above. Basically, the doctor grabbed onto her arm and manipulated it in such a way that her eyes opened as big as saucers! She stared at him, completely taken by surprise, but before she really had time to cry he had already fixed it. And then suddenly it didn’t hurt anymore, so she was back to being in a great mood. Whew!

Overall, in the history of medical issues experienced by our wonderful toddler so far in her short 2+ years, this one was pretty minor. It definitely wasn’t as frightening as the weekend when she did nothing but vomit everything she tried to eat or drink. Obviously it can’t hold a candle to seeing her worked on with a crash cart when she was three weeks old and crashing after being in tachycardia because of her Wolff-Parkinson-White Syndrome. It wasn’t nearly as hard on her dad and me as giving her multiple daily injections of blood thinner because of the deep vein thrombosis she experienced after getting a central line in the same WPW-related event. It didn’t reduce me to tears like watching nurses try to extract a blood sample from her during those weeks she was in the PICU, or insert an IV. It wasn’t as disturbing as seeing her little baby arms tied to the bed so that she couldn’t involuntarily twitch and hurt herself when she was sedated on a ventilator.

So yeah, really – no big deal!