Take An Aspirin and Call Me In the Morning

I went out running last night, and as I stretched afterward, Taylor said, "Mom, you gotta see this."

I said (still stretching), "OK, what is it?"

"A bruise," replied Tay.

"Lacrosse?"

"Yup."

So I walked over to look at a HUGE, lacrosse ball-sized bruise right at his collar bone line. While running drills, he had been running toward a teammate, who shot. Taylor, playing good defense, blocked the shot with his body. :)

As we gathered around the table for dinner, Tay began complaining of a terrible headache. He took some ibuprofen with his meal. But as we ate, he said that his eyes were bugging him. He asked if we could turn off the overhead light. He said he couldn't focus to see his food. This is when I started getting concerned.

We finished dinner, and he and I went to take quick showers. Then we went to the Instacare. It was about 8:00 p.m. We weren't even there long enough to sit down, and they sent us to the ER. We drove to IMC in Murray, where we sat. For a long time. With about 300 other people who were ill or injured. They brought us in for an initial screening and said it would be about 10 minutes before they took us back. 40 minutes later they finally called us back. (BTW, this really wasn't any surprise, considering that it was the ER and there were so many people there.)

When the doc came to examine T, he could hear a strange rushing noise in his carotid artery where he was hit. They were worried about a blood clot forming at that site, which feeds the brain. They did not want (and neither do we!) a blood clot or pieces of clotted blood in the brain causing strokes or brain damage. So he ordered and MRI/MRA to get a clearer picture.

Tay was in the MR area for about an hour and a half. They thought they could see an anomaly in the carotid artery, but they had not done the iodine contrast during the MRA, and they could not see it conclusively. So they ordered a CT scan. They thought they saw a subtle anomaly in the artery, but they did not think it was going to require surgery or major blood thinners. They told us to give Taylor an aspirin a day as a platelet inhibitor, and to call the specialist in the morning. They also ran a vascular ultrasound as a base point, where again they thought they saw a subtle anomaly. The specialist will probably run an additional ultrasound as a follow up early next week.

Taylor is fine, but he's sad, because he will not be playing lacrosse for a while--we'll know more details after we see the specialist.

We got home at 4:00 a.m.