Just under two months ago, on May 7, I almost killed my beautiful little two year old girl. It doesn’t matter that it was an accident and that she escaped relatively unscathed – the fact of the matter is, had fate chosen to respond just 1% differently Salem wouldn’t be here.
Instead of writing this post as a potential catharsis, this page would probably be blank. As would all the other pages that have been published since that date.
The fact that this page isn’t blank does offer me some minor relief – after all, it means she’s alive and well – but it also stands as a major reminder that while we may create many moments to cherish, there are just as many we do not take.
The Accident
With Salem turning two in February of this year, the question of when she should have her first haircut popped up. My wife Jacki was dead against the idea of any haircut then (and Salem has beautiful curly locks, so I can see why), but I’d heard that if you cut (or at least trim) a little girl’s hair when it’s super curly then it grows out even more beautifully.
Given that Ewan, our four year old son, has a regular monthly haircut, we decided to take Salem along for her first haircut on one of Ewan’s scheduled appointments. After all, he was the seasoned pro – he’d look after his sister.
The haircut turned out great – Salem was a trooper, sat perfectly politely, enjoyed watching cartoons, and passed her first haircut “ordeal” with flying colours. That was the great part of that day.
On our way home, we (as per usual) carried both kids on our shoulders – Jacki had Ewan, I had Salem. As we walked onto our street, for some reason Ewan got spooked, and didn’t want to be on Jacki’s shoulders.
I walked over to my wife and son, looked at Ewan and asked what was wrong, since this wasn’t like him – he loved shoulder rides. He simply replied that he was scared and wanted down. So I did what any parent would – I nodded and reached out to get my son down.
All while forgetting I had my daughter on my shoulders.
The moment I reached out for Ewan, I knew something was wrong – the lack of body weight on my shoulders told me I had made a huge mistake, and my daughter was the one about to suffer for it.
I heard the thump at the same time I spun around, and my eyes connected the thump to seeing my daughter hit the ground after falling about five and a half feet (or twice her height) to hard concrete.
My brain told me she had fallen as “safe” as she possibly could have – straight down in a sitting position, as opposed to tumbling backward head-first – but my eyes saw the head bounce off the concrete as Salem fell back after landing, and immediately battled my brain for the truth.
Whatever the truth was, Salem screamed and started crying immediately. Later, I would find out this was a very good thing, but at that moment in time all I could think was I had hurt my daughter and I had to fix that.
The Fear
My wife was still holding Ewan, but lowered him to the ground as I dropped like a dead weight to our daughter, crying uncontrollably on the ground. I swept her up and let my wife take her so I could inspect the back of her head.
My fear of a cracked skull or worse ran through me as I looked for breaks in the skin, contusions, and every other thing you hear about on TV but don’t have a clue about until you wish you did.
While she did have some grazing and the start of a nasty bump, it seemed as though – outwardly – Salem was okay. As I finished checking her head, she turned in Jacki’s arms and reached out for me, still crying, still being brave.
I took her and told Jacki we need to get her to a hospital to check her out, and raced ahead to our home with Salem in my arms, cradling her, soothing her, apologizing to her, kissing her – all the while just wishing I was on the phone to get her to hospital.
The screaming was scary – I didn’t know if she’d had internal injuries to her head, and they were making her scream. You hear the horror stories of brains swelling with head injuries, and you don’t know that’s the case until too late.
Every worst thing you can imagine about head injuries went through my mind as we travelled to the emergency ward. Even when we had the X-ray results and they showed Salem was fine, just some very minor concussion and bruising, I still wondered if I had caused long-term damage. I still do.
I guess that’s what’s called the aftermath.
The Recovery
Even though Salem had been passed “fit” internally, externally the pain was evident. We couldn’t lie her down on her head – or at least with the back of her head on a pillow – for a couple of weeks. She’d scream any time her skull touched a pillow.
I’d sleep on the floor of Salem’s room with her resting on my outstretched arm, keeping her head off the floor and laying on her side. My wife would sleep on the sofa in our home’s grand room, buffering Salem’s head and making sure Salem slept soundly and with the protected snuggle mothers do so well.
It took a while, but eventually Salem slept on her own, with the back of her head on the pillow. That was a big step.
Big steps continued. While we haven’t had any of the kids on our shoulders since the accident, Salem does feel safe when we lift her up and hoist her in the air only to lower her quickly, to give her a feeling of weightlessness. She giggles at that.
While she still holds on a lot tighter to both Jacki and I when we lift her up, she does let us swing her through the air more than she did two months ago. And she giggles.
For all intents and purposes, Salem has recovered from that almost-oh-so-different moment two months ago. I should ask her her secret.
Reactions and Realizations
Since that day, I’ve run through the same scenario countless times, with many, many different outcomes. Sometimes I play these scenarios out in daylight; more often than not, I awake from a perspiration-filled nightmare, where the graphic images of how different that day could have been fill the place where sleep should be.
- if she’d landed on her head instead of her padded pants;
- if she’d twisted downward instead of falling straight;
- if she hadn’t screamed immediately but fell and remained deathly silent when she hit the ground (a scream means no major damage, silence means something many times worse).
Even though my wife drums into me it was an accident, and even though Salem’s beautiful happy face is in our lives versus so many other outcomes that could have been the very real result, I still have almost daily nightmares.
Yet while the nightmares are the recurring guest of a trip I’d rather forget, they (and the fact that Salem is still here versus what could have been) remind me of the moments we do not take, and encourage me to make moments that are taken.
I could have lost my daughter shortly after her second birthday. While I have many wonderful pictures and videos of Salem since her birth, they’re a fraction of what should be recorded for future family dinners. That changed on May 7, 2014.
I’ve always said my family is the number one priority in my life.?Almost losing Salem showed me how fragile that goal is, and how we all need to grasp at these kinds of goals whenever we have the chance.
We’re faced with choices every day:
- do we really need to take that late afternoon meeting that means we won’t be home to see our kids go to sleep?
- do we really need to text our friends when we’re out with our family at the park or at a dinner?
- do we really need to say “in a minute” when just one minute with our kids will make them smile for the rest of the day?
- do we really need to do anything that isn’t a matter of life and death at that moment in lieu of time with our loved ones?
In the grand scheme of things, we’re on this pale blue dot we call home for the shortest of time. Yet we have so many opportunities to create moments that will last a lifetime, and beyond.
Grab onto these moments. Grab them hard and don’t let go. Because you never know when these moments will become the ones we can never make again.