A Teddy Bear Named Courtney

I definitely had one of those, life is good, and I love what I do moments last Saturday night. For those of you who don’t know, I am a child life specialist in the Emergency Dept at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta Egleston Campus. I was working last Saturday from 1:30 until midnight, and around 7 a little girl came in. She had been in a car accident, and miraculously her only injury was a huge gash stretching across the front her head between her eyes and her eyebrows. Her nose wasn’t even broken!! Anyways, I will spare you the bloody details. When this little girl came in she really didn’t remember anything and couldn’t remember much from one minute to the next. So she asked many times what happened, and many times if her mom was there, and many times who I was. She just couldn’t remember. I gave her a teddy bear, because we always give trauma patients teddy bears, and she hugged it and it helped “keep her warm”. As the doctors were checking her out and making sure she had no other injuries, she kept asking what she was hugging and who gave it to her. She told me thank you about 5 or 6 times. I stayed with her and her family through all of the tests and then during the stitching up process. After she was stitched up, I left her with her family and met with a few more kids. Because she had a head injury, she needed to stay in the hospital overnight, so I was going to make her a goody bag to take up there. While I was with other children, they moved her up to the floor, so I took a goody bag to her room. During her CT scan, we were trying to decide what to name her teddy bear, but a decision was never reached. So while in her room, I asked her what she had decided to name it. She looked down at the bear and then back up at me, and said, “It’s name is Courtney.” So forever more this little girl will have a teddy bear named Courtney. I love kids, and I love my job!

*And by the way, by the time she was all stitched up, her memory was back, she still didn’t remember the accident, but did remember who people were and what she had been told had happened.*