One of the issues we have with Antony is that for numerous reasons he tends to bang his head. If he has a meltdown, he’ll throw himself to the floor. Sometimes he’s running and gets distracted and trips over himself.
So we get big bumps on his forehead quite often. It’d been a few weeks since the last one and he’d had a really good week. His teachers told us that he was really settled yesterday morning and he’d been a star eating his lunch.
Sod’s law dictates that such favourable conditions can’t persist, so at lunch he fell and banged his head again. School react like you’d expect when a child has an egg-sized lump suddenly appear on their forehead. Suggestions that we take him to the doctors or A&E. Now, we know that Antony is prone to bruising on his head so it didn’t worry us as much as them.
From experience I know that the GP won’t see him for a head injury. They’ll send us to A&E, but a 5 hour wait isn’t great when the patient struggles to sit still for 5 minutes. As always in this situation I call 111 – this makes sure the incident is recorded and we get advice from a professional. It’s usually the same: don’t let him sleep for more than an hour, call 999 if he goes unresponsive.
Thankfully this time he recovered quickly and after a dose of paracetamol he felt much better. But it pushed us over a line we’d hoped not to cross. We’re going to buy him a head guard. We talked to his headteacher about it and his concern was the same as ours – it’ll make him stand out on the playground. But safety is paramount. Now we just have to figure out how to get him to wear it!