12 year old kid accidentally shoots himself in the head with a BB gun, and the BB gets lodged under the skin. Dad attempts to remove the BB using a utility knife. Sure maybe not the smartest or least potentially non infectious way to do it. In the end they can’t get the BB out, so Dad takes him to the ER, where the pro’s are able to get the BB out without further incident.
The report’s not clear, but I guess since it technically was a gun shot wound, the police were notified and the kid was taken into child protective custody.
Seriously?
When I was kid, we used to have BB gun wars with the neighborhood kids. Some one always got one of those damn things stuck under the skin, and the only way to get them out was to cut them out. No big deal, maybe would leave a tiny scar.
So do you think that Dad deserved to lose his kid, because he attempted to remove the BB himself or let his kid play with his BB gun and get shot?
Things are certainly different now from when I grew up. One of our neigbourhood kids (when I was a kid) got shot in the eye and they didn’t take him away. He did spend a considerable amount of time at an out-of-town specialty hospital and pretty much lost his vision though.
Maybe there’s more to the story. How do you accidentally shoot yourself in the head with a BB gun? Aren’t they all rifles? I’ll bet he was having war games and didn’t want to implicate his friends. Fathers who allow war games with BB guns today are maybe not up for Father of the Year award.
I’m more concerned that an adult would try to administer medical care of that magnitude than the kid getting his hands on a BB gun. My older bother and cousin had bb guns when I was a kid and there was never a question that NOBODY PUTS THEIR FREAKIN’ MITTS ON IT WITHOUT PERMISSION AND SUPERVISION. However, twelve year old boys will get in to stuff, I guess, so I don’t want to condemn someone for the mi’schievous actions of a young man.
But it seems pretty incompetent for an adult not to immediately seek professiona, medical help.
Yeah, I’d say any idiot who tried to remove a BB from his child’s head with a utility knife need some looking into as to whether he’s a suitable guardian for a child. What an imbecile. Your child gets shot and you think, “Oh, I’ll just dig around his scalp with this box cutter?”
But it can be hard to know when a child needs to go to the ER and when they can be treated at home. Last month my daughter fell off a swing in our backyard. She cried that her hand hurt, but I figured it was just bruised. 5 days later the school nurse told me she thought it was broken, so I took her to the hospital. Sure enough the metacarpal was fractured in two places. Was I negligent in just putting ice on it and figuring it was OK for 5 days?
I wouldn’t do it, but I get how to someone who grew up on a farm it would make perfect sense. We used to play “tag” with rubber bbs when I was a kid, and woudln’t have thought twice about administering first aid to a flesh wound, and this sounds like less than that - a skin wound.
Really, a bb under the skin is no more dangerous than a bad sliver or a skinned knee. I’m sure he was afraid of exactly what happened, that a care worker would overreact and call CPS. Taking a knife to it? Probably the step too far. Surgeons learn a lot of stuff before they do that.
But I do also believe that there is more to the story - CPS is not generally anxious to remove kids from loving homes.
Eh, maybe they didn’t realize how bad it was until it started getting infected and swollen. A BB injury may be absolutely nothing, or it may be a big deal. It’s not always easy to figure it out. Maybe they don’t have insurance and he didn’t want a $2000 ER bill for a bandaid and some neosporin. Hell, maybe they DO have insurance and he didn’t want an ER bill for a bandaid and neosporin - insurance companies are notorious for rejecting ER claims that they claim weren’t emergencies.
I see no reason why they had to remove the kid from the father while doing the investigation.
We’re talking about a BB shot. This is not like a .22 or higher caliber. This is maybe 2-3 mm. I’ve had splinters lodged under my skin bigger than a BB. Dad may not have considered it serious enough to consider taking his kid to the hospital right away. I had friends as a kid that had BB’s stuck under their skin for years.
So the parent’s of a kid that falls out of tree and breaks his ankle but the parents think it’s possibly just a sprain, but a day later decide to go to the ER should be investigated?
Well that’s pretty dumb. It happens all the time. Broken bones don’t come with red flag and whistles letting you know. A few months earlier one of my kids slammed his foot in the car door. It swelling up like a balloon and was black and blue. We went to the ER, and after 8 hours and x-rays and lots of doctors and nurses we found out it wasn’t broken, just bruised. Of course the day off work and the hospital bills really added up, and it would have been just as well to keem her home with an ice pack on it.
So you can’t know. You just do your best and make a judgement call.
A photo of the resulting wound might help a bit, ie how much he got butchered before they took him in. The delay in treatment plus that does suggest poor judgment.
Suunds like they’re checking out if they were the ones who shot him as well.
Yep, when I was in 3rd grade I broke my arm during morning recess. They kept me at school all day, called my parents to pick me up at the end of the day and made it very clear to them that I was being a drama queen. My parents listened to them until the next morning when they finally took me to the hospital (almost 24 hrs by the time I saw a doctor). The doctor then told them that the school was right and there was no way my arm was broken. After the x-rays everyone was kissing up for weeks. I guess these days I’d have been a foster child and my parents would be suing the school.
C’mon guys. This is a little blurb, not an in-depth article. There could be a lot of other factors at play that didn’t get into a paragraph. Maybe the ER staff saw something in the kid’s history. Maybe the kid seems scared and had tell-tale bruises. Maybe Dad was acting…strangely. There could be a lot of things that would make the ER staff think the police should look into before releasing the kid back to his custody. They may just not mention them to the reporter. I googled and there were several news hits, all with same coulpe of paragraphs.
maybe dad was scared of something like this happening when he would take his son to the ER? Maybe he was scared of the bill he’d get and could not afford?
I think we are individualizing a bigger problem here. I think it is an hysterical overreaction on the part of CPS to take the kid away.