The family was walking home from the restaurant, and we were on the Westin property where we were staying for the week. Dana was to my left, Dawn and Dillon were on my right as we walked down the sidewalk. We came upon an intersection in the sidewalk where we could either keep walking straight or we could turn right. I was planning to continue straight. Dana, whom was still on my left side, thought we were going to turn right. At this point she was about a half step in front of me and when she turned to walk right, she tripped over my foot as I stepped forward to continue walking straight. Is all this making sense? Basically she crossed in front of me and I accidently tripped her.
She fell forward and landed face down on the sidewalk. When she hit, I heard a cracking sound and thought that she might have hit her nose or forehead on the sidewalk. She immediatly started crying and was very slow to lift her head up from the sidewalk. As soon as I saw her raise her head there was already a bit of blood on the ground and I knew we were in trouble. At this point I was still behind her so I could not quite see what had happened but instinctively I placed my right palm under her chin and felt blood all over her face. Remember the "Arm" incident from my previous post? That kept me from using my left arm. Then as she started to stand up she started coughing and trying to spit something out of her mouth. It was more blood and pieces of something. I still had my hand under her chin because I realized that it was her chin that was bleeding, not her nose or her forehead. When I looked at what was in her mouth I found out that it was pieces of a broken tooth! Now I was thinking that she may have broken her jaw... Her chin was bleeding quit a bit and she had a rather long, 2 inch or so, cut on the underside of her chin.
We hurridly walked, with my hand still under her chin to suppress the bleeding, into the lobby of the hotel and asked the desk clerk to call an ambulance. He suggested that we call the house doctor that was on the property and we agreed. By now, we were covered in blood and I wonder what the other hotel guests were thinking? I had been keeping pressure on her open cut for about 10 minutes and it was finally starting to coagulate enough that I could get a better look at the cut in the light of the lobby. It didn't seem to be too bad but it would definitely need stitches. The house doctor came rolling up, yes that's right, rolling up on a Segway. Cool!! He had his doctor's bag strapped to the front of the thing and within minutes had a bandage affixed to Dana's chin and was giving up directions to Paradise Valley Hospital.
The interesting thing was that the doctor admitted than the wound needed to be closed surgically but he noted that Dana might stand the treatment better and would perhaps heal more aesthetically if he used "SuperGlue" to close the wound. We debated the issue and agreed that since the cut was near the front edge of the lower side of her chin that it would be better to use the "glue" treatment. This only took about 2 minutes to apply the glue and wait for it to sufficiently harden.
It healed very nicely but the ER doc never found where the pieces of the tooth came from. When we returned home, our local dentist found, and pulled, the cracked tooth as it was a baby tooth and she would loose it eventually anyway.
Here is a picture Dana in the hot tub keeping her chin above water, like the doctor told her, the next day. You can "barely" see the cut under her chin.
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