On Sunday after church, Sylvia didn’t want to go inside. She lay down on the driveway and refused to get up. So Jordan picked her up by the arm. Then she really started to cry. This isn’t unusual, so it took a while for us to realize that her crying was now from pain rather than defiance. We didn’t see any bruises or anything obvious, so we gave her some pain killer and hoped she’d get over it.

Several hours later it hadn’t diminished, so we called our doctor, who told us to go to the emergency room. She suspected it was nursemaid’s elbow, which is easy to fix, but is best taken care of quickly.

The triage nurse at the emergency room had the same opinion, as did the doctor when we eventually saw him. Popping the bone back into place didn’t take long, but it didn’t take on the first try, and after the second try it took a while for the pain to go away. In between, Sylvia got X-rays and Jordan got dinner. The worst of it was having to wait for so long. We left for the emergency room around 5:30 or 6:00, and Sylvia and I didn’t have dinner until 10:00.

If we have a few more trips to the emergency room, Sylvia will start to recognize how unusual Ian’s experience was.

On Saturday I took a nap. It didn’t feel restful, and I remember at least once gasping for air. For at least an hour afterward, I felt the need to take deep breaths. On Sunday I had the same experience, only I was alert enough at the end to notice that my chin was resting on my neck. (I don’t have a double-chin.) When I nap, I’ve been using Jordan’s new “memory foam” pillow. It is convex in the middle, so it mainly supports the neck, with only a little padding for the head. The “memory” part is that it shrinks with heat, leaving an impression wherever you touch it.

The problem is that after sleeping for a while, the “memory” means that the neck no longer has any support. The pillow seems to work fine for Jordan, but I’m not going to be borrowing it any more.