A Broken Baby Nose

So saturday we were getting ready for game night, our weekly ritual of friends coming over and playing games after our kids go to bed. It was around 5:30 i suppose and I was just walking in the kitchen to start dinner, i heard a tumble in the living room which probably meant that Katie fell, she is still trying to master standing and walking and takes several tumbles a day. However it wasn't the usual wimper when she fell it was a wailing! I turned around and picked her up, she was near the window so i assumed she might have hit the window sill, but she seemed fine, then as i was holding her, her nose began to bleed...and bleed...and bleed! I was shocked none of my kids has ever had a bloody nose, the only one who's bled any significant amount was Maggie at 2 years old when she took a header into the book shelf and had to have stiches in her forehead. Well here is my little tiny baby, only a few days away from turning one and she has a gusher of a nose bleed. So i was a little concerned but i kept her leaning forward so she wouldn't swallow the blood and within a few minutes it stopped. Still a little worried i decided to call the advice line, we have Kaiser insurance and it's kind of handy to be able to call a nurse any hour or day. So the advice nurse asked me all sorts of questions but it came down to the fact that i hadn't seen her fall and didn't see where she hit. If she hit her nose it could be a broken nose, but if she hit her head and had a nose bleed that's a much more serious matter. So just to be safe i took her to the emergency room at Kaiser in Modesto. Well we (Kimby and Katie and I) were there for about 4 hours before a doctor finally saw us, and it was about 10pm and she hadn't shown any signs of a head injury, but her nose was swollen. The doctor took one look and said she probably broke her nose but the amount of bone in a baby nose is so tiny that it's impressive she was able to hit it, and since her nose wasn't crooked or anything there was really nothing they were going to do about it. Katie was very good despite being quite tired she was more than patient as the doctor gave her a full check up anyway, she sat and let him look in her ears and eyes and mouth and listen to her faint heart murmur, sat there like a pro. When all was said and done there were no major injuries to speak of, just a funny story about how a baby managed to break such a tiny little bone.