Mom, my arm hurts...

When my husband was a little boy, he was rolling down the little hill by his church, jumping off the stairs to launch himself into a faster roll. As the story goes, he went inside and told his mom, "My arm hurts."

My mother in law, like most of the good moms I know said, "You'll be fine, go back out to play."

He returned minutes later with a "Mom, my arm hurts." and again, she said, "You are okay...go play."

Finally, when he returned for a third time, she took off his coat and found his arm hanging oddly...broken.

Fast forward 20 years to our small group party on Sunday night. Calvin took a tumble onto the raised corner of concrete driveway. One of our friends is a nurse and she didn't think it was broken, but he went to bed with ice and woke up complaining the next morning. I waffled about taking him to the doctor but decided to wait and watch. He seemed fine until later in the day when he was riding his scooter, hit the curvy part in the sidewalk and fell...on the same arm. He screamed like a maniac and this time I was pretty sure he had finished the job. Once he calmed down, I asked him to help me understand how much it hurt.

In a moment of either brilliance or just plain awfullness, I told him, "If your arm is broken, you won't be able to swim for the rest of the summer and I'll have to spend your birthday money at the doctor." He sucked his bottom lip in and said, "I'll be okay."

And he did seem just fine. Until he fell out of his sister's top bunk and fell on...you guessed it...his arm. "My arm hurts" indeed. He eventually went on to play and doesn't seem to be favoring it. If you squeeze it a certain way, he flinches. It looks even and not lumpy like it did when (a couple of years ago) he broke his other arm...

Last night he had a fever. But it is gone this morning. Are these things related? Does he have some kind of infection swarming around a broken bone? Am I the mother who wouldn't take her kid to the doctor when he really needed to go? WHY DIDN'T I GO TO MEDICAL SCHOOL????