Meredith split her lip last night. 
Poor baby. She was playing with Kris on a hill and fell and bit right through her lip. Both sides were bleeding and today it’s very puffy. We were a bit on the fence on whether to take her to the ER for stitches, but it stopped bleeding pretty quickly and is actually a fairly small cut. I posted a picture for some friends and they agreed that wait and see was probably the best approach. Stitches here for a child as young as her mean being strapped to a board and held down. It sounds traumatizing for both of us. Of course if I thought it was necessary I wouldn’t hesitate to do it anyway. I’m not sure it could be stitched anyway where it is, and then I’d also have to try and stop her from playing with them. I am a little worried about scarring, but stitches don’t necessarily prevent scarring either.
Kris’ sister got a very bad burn on her face when she was around Meredith’s age. The doctors told his mom that she would have permanent scars because of it. Kris’ mom used vitamin E oil on it every day and it healed faster than the doctors expected and with no scarring. Maybe it wasn’t the vitamin E oil, maybe his sister just has really great skin (and if so I hope Meredith got her skin), but regardless I think I’m going to pick some up today.
Last night:
This morning:
You can see in the picture how red her nose is. She obviously hit that too though luckily it wasn’t bleeding at all. That picture doesn’t really show how puffy her lip is. The area inside where she bit it is very white. It looks like the world’s worst canker sore.
Things like this make me so glad I still nurse her though. She was sobbing last night, and I quickly cleaned it up a little bit to see how bad it was, gave her Arnica, then started nursing. The nursing calmed her down enough that we could clean it up better while she nursed and get a better picture of whether we should be heading to ER. A lot of people don’t know this, but the act of nursing produces hormones in the baby that act as pain relief. Breast milk has antibiotic properties, so was probably great to help clean the cuts inside and out of her mouth.
Once she was calmer and had nursed her fill, we gave her some frozen blueberries to try and help with the swelling (she wouldn’t let us near it with ice). We ended up giving her some Motrin too, as it was obvious she was still in pain and it was extremely swollen. She slept snuggled into the crook of my arm all night.
Today it doesn’t seem to be bothering her, though it’s still pretty swollen. I wish things like this didn’t happen to our babies.
Posted on November 5th, 2008 by AttachedMama
Filed under: Natural Living
Ohh!! Poor Meredith! That looks SO sore! It doesn’t look like it’ll scar from the pictures so hopefully not. It DOES look really swollen though - like a big bee sting!
Give her a big kiss from me
My heart goes out to her and you. My baby boy fell on hard wood floor and put his teeth through is bottom lip and then 3 months later fell on his face and broke his nose. My heart just drops each time. I agree breastfeeding is the best soothing/treatment. FYI our daughter cut her chin and they glued it which was way less invasive, but wether they glue depends on the time of wound. Sending healing wishes for Meredith.
Alice, Thank you! It looks better today. I gave her a big kiss from you.
Dragonfly, thank you. Nice to “see” you here. Your poor boy, ouch! I was a bit worried about her nose, but it seems fine. She has a bad case of road rash but otherwise it’s healing nicely. That’s interesting about the glue, I’d forgotten they could do that too. It looked huge and gaping to me the first night, but now that it’s healed a bit it’s actually a relatively small cut and I’m not sure they would have done anything for it at all anyway.
Poor little thing! I hate when stuff like that happens.