Bites, Bruises and Malaysian Ditches

Unfortunately, we have to have a special post for injuries and mishaps. In the week before we left on the trip, Audrey came down with a cold. She started with a slight fever one afternoon, which disappeared very quickly, but was replaced by a runny nose and sneezing. We were REALLY hoping to avoid having the kids get sick right before leaving as flying for 21 hours could be miserable with a head cold. Thankfully Audrey cycles through illnesses quickly (which I attribute to the fact that she went through a licking phase when she was 2. She would randomly lick things- once it was the walls of the elevator in the doctor's office (EW!) and once it was the handrail in the Beijing subway station!!(SHUDDER!!) And everything in between for several months. She apparently built up a rather incredible immune system with these antics b/c she rarely gets sick) She did indeed get better moments before leaving town, but of course we were worried that Scarlett would get ill. And as you know from our previous post, she did come down with a fever and runny nose in Singapore. Poor babies! So on Tuesday morning (in Penang), Audrey woke up early complaining that her elbow hurt and she couldn't sleep any more. I looked at it and it looked fine. By the time we sat down for breakfast, her elbow had swollen to twice it's normal size and was super puffy. It looked like a spider had bitten her. We gave her benadryl and marked the area with a pen to watch it's progress. It did grow a bit more throughout the day, so we marked it's new line, but by this morning (Wednesday), it had subsided quite a bit. Phew!
As I stated earlier, one of our last stops in Penang was at the park to let the kids play, which they did. On our way back to the car, Joe was carrying Scarlett. There is a concrete drainage ditch that you have to step over, no more than 2' wide, but about 3' deep. We had JUST been talking about how careful you have to be around those things on our way to the food market as Laurel relayed a story to us about how her friend fell in one while carrying his baby. Well, you guessed it. As I was trying to help Audrey across, Joe stepped across with one foot and somehow slipped and fell when he didn't get his proper footing. It all happened so fast, but the part that I still can't shake is the sound of Scarlett's head hitting the concrete. That is one of the worst sounds in to world! I screamed, jumped down to rescue Scarlett and help Joe up. The poor guy had twisted one foot and scraped up the other shin. Within seconds he had a giant goose egg on his shin and an ankle starting to swell. Scarlett got a tiny little quail egg on the back of her head, but of course my mind raced to imagining her with a brain hemmorage and needing to be cut open half way around the world! (Thankfully I just have an overactive imagination!) We raced back to the apartment where Laurel quickly got a bucket of ice together for Joe to put his foot in and I got bags of ice for Joe's leg and Scarlett's head, while Audrey tried to help stop the bleeding on Joe's leg. We had about 45-60 minutes before we needed to leave for the airport, but luckily all seemed to be doing better by the time we left. Fortunately I had packed the gigantic band-aid into our travel first aid kit (not thinking we would really need it and that it probably was just taking up space for more practical, smaller, Hello Kitty band-aids) as well as the neosporin. (And yes, "practical" and "Hello Kitty" were used in the same sentence) Both necessary tools when your husband falls into a Malaysian sewer/ drainage ditch. In an effort to always look on the brighter side of a situation, at least he is up to date with his shots and the ditch was dry and not flowing with who knows what!