My First Real Black Eye

No one ever warned me about the hazards of feeding my baby in the middle of the night. Or about the hazards of staying up too late to work. Together, they're a bad combination.

Friday night I stayed up way too late because I was trying to finish a project for work. I was in a groove, I had no distractions from Miss M., and I was anxious to finish a major phase of the project before calling it quits for the night. I ended up climbing into bed just before 2:00 a.m. I knew I would be tired when Madeline decided to begin our day, but it felt very worth it.

Fast forward to 7:00 a.m., when I woke up with a start because Madeline was crying pretty hard. It was still pitch black outside and I thought it was the middle of the night. I was totally delirious from being pulled out of a pretty deep sleep, and I wasn't thinking. For some reason Madeline's cries seemed especially urgent, so in my automatic-mama mode, I jumped out of bed and seriously ran to her aid. It just seemed like the thing to do, even though running is a bit dramatic when her room is only two feet away from ours.

There was just one problem: our bedroom door was halfway open. I slammed into the edge of the door at a pretty good speed, smacking both my head and my knee. Dave bolted upright when he heard my cries of pain and asked me what was wrong. I still couldn't think, but I knew I was really and truly hurt, and I knew Madeline was still crying. I sent Dave to help Madeline while I assessed the damage. When I put my hand up to my face, it came away slick with blood.

Once I actually saw the gash on my forehead, I immediately knew I needed stitches. I had visions of dramatically pounding on our neighbors' door and thrusting our baby at them as we rushed off to get help, but when we took a moment to think, we found out the urgent care facility wasn't open for a couple of hours anyway. We ended up driving home so my dad could stitch me up, which was a great decision. We saved a bucketload of money, I was stitched up by someone who is really good at stitches and wouldn't leave a scar, and we had some unexpected quality time with the fam.

In the end, I came away from the whole experience with seven stitches near my eyebrow and a huge black eye. My eye got progressively worse and swollen for the first two days--I couldn't even open my eye when I woke up on Sunday morning. I still have a black eye, but it's looking better and starting to fade away. I'll take the stitches out on Thursday.

Here's a picture of the offending door, so you can visualize what I ran into:


This is how I looked right after I got the stitches:



And this is how I looked later that night:


Dave and I have laughed so hard about my injury. I still can't believe I (a) hurt myself while getting up to feed my baby and (b) seriously ran into a door and ended up with stitches. Ridiculous! But thank heavens for Dr. G.