It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year

School is about to start, so it's time to have all those rashes, bug bites and aches and pains checked that kids have had all summer.  It is also the time of year for requests for school and sports physicals, and immunizations to be updated which we do NOT do; lack of planning on the part of the parents does NOT constitute an emergency.  This is just laziness because I know the local school nurses send updates in the spring notifying each grade level to start making their summer pediatric appointments promptly because they book up three or four months in advance.  It is pretty hard to get an appointment once June rolls around, and by the end of August you are just crap out of luck and your kid won't be playing sports without that physical form.  So just do it already.  Some people will try to parlay a bogus injury into a comprehensive physical exam, but we are wise to that and won't sign the forms.

During the school year we see WAAAAAAYYYY too many school-age kids at 9:00 or 10:00 PM with injury sustained during the day.  It is one thing to try common sense remedies such as RICE (Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevate) for hours and then bring the kid in because it is very painful.  Most often the complaints of knee, foot, ankle pain are reported near bed time without any intervention.  After a full day of school, sports, playing and jumping on the trampoline for an hour the kid reports the injury as "not better" and the parents race to the ER for an x-ray, walking without difficulty.

So I am going to go out on a limb here and suggest, as a public service, that this school year a little common sense be deployed when it comes to breaking land speed records getting to the ER for a negative X-ray.  See RICE, above.

Also, crutches are really not fun after about an hour.