A Hospital Visit with My Daughter
This is a picture of me and my daughter a few weeks ago on a hospital bed at around 2:00am in the morning. She had rolled out of bed and banged her head at the metal foot of our computer desk (the kids' bedroom is also my wife's home office). It was 1:00am when she ran into our room screaming. After I soothed her a bit and told her to lie on our bed, I went downstairs to get an ice pack. When I returned, there was blood all over the pillow and down the side of her neck; seeing this, she freaked out even more.
After I cleaned up the blood as much as I could, I asked her if I could examine her wound. Trembling with fear, she said yes. I discovered that she had a large cut at the side of her head around an inch and a half in length. Upon this, I asked her to sit down in the bathroom. I closed the bathroom door and went to discuss privately with my wife. I surmised that she didn't have any serious permanent damage since she didn't black out, she didn't have slurred speech nor did she feel any nausea, but she likely needed stitches. I suggested that we consider taking her to the hospital to double check and also to get stitches to avoid problems in healing and a permanent scar. Moreover, going to the hospital in the middle of the night was our best bet since there'll be minimal line ups (sigh, our medical system is way over capacity). After my wife agreed, I returned to the bathroom and asked my daughter, "Do you want daddy to tell you what's going on?" Still in a panic, she replied, "No!.... Yes!... No!..... Okay!" I proceeded to tell her the game plan but asked her for her permission to go to the hospital. I wanted her to make the decision out of strength rather than out of helplessness. I assured her that daddy will be with her the whole time. She finally agreed.
Long story short, the whole visit to the hospital was pleasant and smooth and we left at 5:00am with the doctor having used her long hair to close the wound to apply medical glue to help with the healing instead of applying stitches. I brought her to 7-Eleven for ice cream, and the female cashier probably thought I was the worst dad in the world or the best dad in the world; after hearing that we came from the hospital, her smile concluded the latter. This incident made me reflect on two things:
One, I recognize the low resilience of young people today, so I determined that I would raise my daughter to face her fears, act out of strength rather than out of victimhood and strive to solve rather than complain about problems. I took a gamble by putting the decision on her court whether to go to the hospital or not (but knowing my daughter, I had guessed that she would make a wise decision after I laid before her the options and respective consequences). In things that I consider within her capacity, I want her to decide so that she would own her decisions.
Second, without my prompting, on the way to the hospital, she prayed in the car with the kind of dependent faith that only a child could have, saying, "Please God, have mercy on me and heal me, please let the hospital people be nice. Please God."
In the end, whether she was at school or at church, she kept telling people that that was the best day ever because she got to hang out with me, watch kid YouTube videos (we usually limit screen time) and she got ice cream in the middle of the night! I hope that this experience would be one of many significant moments in my daughter's life that'll grow her to be a confident and competent woman as well as nudge her towards a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.
