Anders Fell Down and Broke His Head

Does this look like a kid with a concussion to you?

I will never look at the words to that song the same way! "No more Anders jumping on the bed!" I never realized how serious a concussion can be. On Sunday, we had a really horrible experience that we've never had before. It was my little brother, Kenny's LDS mission homecoming at my parent's ward. The second sacrament meeting ended, Anders and his cousin, Ryder ran off and started pretending to play basketball in the gym (or so we thought). We were just hanging out, talking to family and friends, when I heard a loud crash. My first thought was, "great, another bump on his forehead." I just kept on talking until my sister yelled out, "Melissa, he hit his head!" I didn't stop to process what was going on, I just started climbing over the chairs to get to Anders. When I finally got over there, Christian's brother, Stephen was holding Anders. He wasn't crying as loud as he usually does, so I said, "he's fine, he would be crying a lot louder if he was really hurt. As more people came over, we were able to figure out what happened. Anders had fallen off a stage about 4 feet off the ground and landed flat on his back on a hardwood floor. He whined for a long time and we started getting more and more concerned. He wouldn't look straight at us and wouldn't answer any questions. We decided to go home and watch him closely. While we were on our way home, I was trying to talk to him and get something normal out of him so I could feel better. He kept crying and began crying harder and holding his head. Finally, he started hanging his head and falling asleep. I yelled his name and shook his leg. I thought it was me over-reacting at first, but then he did it again. We immediately flipped our car around and took him to Kid's Care. It didn't take long to realize that our poor little guy has a concussion. He finally started acting like himself again while we were waiting for the doctor to come in the room. We were on high alert for the first 24 hours to make sure he didn't have a bleed in his brain. Phew! We're now past that! The doctor told us to keep him off of trampolines and away from things he can climb on for two weeks. I feel so bad for him. He feels fine and doesn't understand why we won't let him do anything fun. He has to sit back and watch all the other kids jumping and having a great time. A kid can only have so much fun in the sandbox! He keeps telling me, "my head's all better! Let's go to the park!"