for good reason<\/a>), but\u00a0it was only a few days before I ended up being the regular wound cleaner.<\/p>\nHe was extremely nervous the first time I did it, specifically about how I was going to wash out the scrape.<\/p>\n
“Don’t just spray the cleaner on it,” he said. “Spray it on a gauze pad and pat it.”<\/p>\n
I examined\u00a0the\u00a0can of wound cleaner. It\u00a0emitted a stream of cool sterile water when you pressed the button.\u00a0It didn’t spray,\u00a0so much as dribble. The water came out with considerably less force than a faucet. “But I have to,” I said. “I want the water to run over the wound and carry the dirt away.”<\/p>\n
“It’ll hurt!” he said.<\/p>\n
“Not as much as if I\u00a0pat the wound with gauze.”<\/p>\n
“Please, Daddy! Please don’t.”<\/p>\n
“Let me just try.”<\/p>\n
“No!”<\/p>\n
“Okay, okay. Geez.\u00a0Tell you what, I’ll squirt the blood that’s away from the cut, clean the edges.”<\/p>\n
“No!”<\/p>\n
“Trust me. It’s not going to hurt. Here. The problem might be because you’re watching.” I\u00a0held a towel up\u00a0to shield the wound from his eyes. “Ready?”<\/p>\n
He was breathing fast and shallow, but nodded.<\/p>\n
“Okay.” I squirted the water on his leg about six inches below the wound, so far down on his shin that it didn’t touch anything but healthy skin.<\/p>\n
“Ow!” He grabbed the towel and yanked it away. “It hurts! It hurts so bad!”<\/p>\n
“I didn’t even – ”<\/p>\n
He glared at me. “How could you do<\/em> that? How could you do that to your own son?”<\/p>\n“Do you see where the water is?” I pointed at the wet spot on his leg. “That’s where I squirted you.”<\/p>\n
“No, you didn’t! You squirted right on the cut!”<\/p>\n
“Hmm…” I stood up. “You know what? I think maybe you better do it. I’ll get the gauze pad wet for you. You clean the scrape.”<\/p>\n
And that’s what he did.<\/p>\n
I’m happy to report that over the next few weeks, I eventually re-gained his trust, and he let me do the cleaning. He never did let me squirt it, though.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Call this a trust exercise gone horribly wrong. Enjoy!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[123,122,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-cute","category-daddytales-n","category-daddytales-funny"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-E6","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2486","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2486"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2486\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}