Charles on… anything that comes along

Got a phone call the other day from our childrens’ primary school. “It’s [child2],” they said. “We’re a bit worried about his elbow.”

How exactly is one meant to react to a call like this? Say “Oh my GOD his ELBOW I’m coming down there AT ONCE!”? I suspect that was how they wanted me to react. I rather didn’t.

“What do you mean, worried?” I said.
“Well, he’s been carrying it oddly - he fell over and he says it hurts.”

OK, so we’re now getting slightly somewhere. Let us begin to take a medical history, but unlike in ER where they ask the patient face-to-face, I’m doing it over the phone to someone who isn’t the patient. Ho hum, sure this happens to GPs all the time.

“So is it swollen? Is it red?” I ask.
“Er, no,” comes the reply.
“Does it hurt him to move it?”
Pause. Off-phone, I hear her ask if it hurts to move it, and he says - he’s clearly in the office - yes. Which you would expect, to be honest, from any child.

Thinking that at least this is going to be a lot simpler than House, we move on. He can move it, so it’s probably not broken. Or at least not seriously. Let’s move on to other possibilities..

“If you squeeze his elbow and he moves it, does it hurt him?” More noise off-phone. Comes back. “He says yes.”

“Fine,” I say. We have a diagnosis.

“Well, he can’t have chipped the bone,” I say. “If he had, he’d be screaming in pain when you did that. I think he’s just banged it. It’ll get better.”

“Oh,” they say, as though I’ve told them something incredible.

When exactly was it that schools became completely bobbins at telling whether a child has a broken leg or just a flea bite? Why can’t they actually do anything? Why is it that they’re in loco parentis, yet won’t do the obvious things that any parent would do - ask questions that would find out whether any “injury” is the real thing, or what. Schools these days not only don’t seem to have a nurse (at least the primaries), but don’t have a clue about how to tell whether someone’s properly ill or injured or not.

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