And on Today's Episode of "As the Emergency Room Turns..."

In the last ten and three quarters years, I have spent more time in emergency medical situations than I did in the entire first 32 years of my life.

I remember when I was in fifth grade and my teacher, who had two boys, would tell stories about how his sons were constantly breaking or spraining appendages, requiring stitches, or getting general injuries requiring medical attention.

Having two sisters, I totally couldn't relate. Girls. We just don't tend to end up in the ER as often, apparently. At least not in my family.

As a result, I feel woefully unprepared for the medical drama that is associated with boys. You know, like scalpings, impalement, hypoxia, wrist breakages, other miscellaneous scalp lacs and head traumas. Please note: not all of these injuries belong to the little people in this house.

Anyway, for the last two days, the boys have been at Learn to Ski days for school. Since they would be skiing until 3:30pm each day, I took advantage of the opportunity to take a ski lesson myself.

I won't go into the various forms of torture my ski instructor put me through, but today, I wasn't so eager to run back out to the mountain. So I stayed home getting caught up on work. Around 12:45pm, I realized I was going to be finished around 1:30pm and since I had to go to the resort to pick up the kids anyway, I figured I'd at least go make a couple of runs to be sure all of my limbs were still in working order.

Thirty seconds later, the phone rang. It was Eamonn saying that he had just received a call. Declan had "taken a digger," in his words, and was at the mountain's medical center.

Now, over the years I've worked to stay calm in a crisis, but the first words out of my mouth were, "Why did they call you insted of me?" Not, "Oh no! My baby! Is he hurt?" Maybe I need to be a little less calm in a crisis and not worry why the medical people didn't call me since I was the one on the emergency contact forms (Turns out, Declan gave them the wrong phone number for me, but remembered Eamonn's number perfectly. I reminded him that BOTH numbers are on the back of his helmet...and in the pocket of his coat...).

Anyway, I was still in my workout clothes so I threw on real clothing and ran out the door.

Declan had been skiing down a steep-ish run and, in Eamonn's words, "took a digger," hitting himself in the nose with his ski pole on the way down and leaving a nice pool of blood in the snow which always creates a lot of excitement--all of that red on the lovely contrasting white, right? Because there was a lot of blood and he was dizzy, his ski instructor called ski patrol and Declan became the first person in our family to have the honor of being littered off the mountain on the ski patrol sled.

Sweet.

(I had a million questions about how comfortable that was. He said it wasn't that bad.)

An x-ray confirmed there was no serious injury. Words like "nasal contusion" and "mild closed head injury" are on the discharge papers (as in, his nose is bruised and he bumped his head). However, he is restricted from any sports for the next week. He'll be cleared to play hockey just before his game next Saturday (good news since he's the goalie). They take head injuries very seriously these days.

Once discharged, he ate a cheeseburger the size of Texas with a side of fries and then ran down the Beaver Creek cookie lady to get one of the free, warm chocolate chip cookies that are given out every day at 3pm.

I'm pretty sure he's feeling just fine.

See you next time on "As the Emergency Room Turns." Or not if we're lucky. Ha.