Seattle-mom Erika Bigelow was enjoying a pleasant afternoon at Wallingford Park with her 20-month-old son Jack last summer when the unimaginable happened. During a playground activity most parents would consider completely safe, she inadvertently broke both of his legs.
They were taking a trip down a metal slide together when Jack's legs flipped out, his Crocs got wedged, and her momentum kept them moving, twisting his limbs. Jack seemed fine in the stroller and car ride home, but cried as soon as he put weight on his legs. It was obvious something was wrong. Bigelow immediately took Jack to the emergency room where X-rays showed fractures in both of his legs from the force of their slide accident.
It turns out that these occurrences are not uncommon. In a study published this week in the Journal of Pediatric Orthopedics, a relationship was found between young children going down a slide on the lap of an adult and tibia, or shinbone, fractures. Over an 11-month period, 13.8 percent of such fractures in kids at New York's Winthrop University Hospital were incurred while sliding on an adult's lap. Their ages ranged from 14 to 32 months.
In the study, the injuries were sustained when a child placed his leg in a position where it became fixed while both the adult and child continued moving down the slide, or when the child's leg became twisted, creating a torque that led to a fracture.
Bigelow had never heard of such a thing, but Jack's injuries didn't seem to surprise his E.R. doctor, who assured her that a significant number of emergency accidents of young children happen on slides. Whether from a fall or getting their legs stuck or twisted, these accidents impact both the parents and the kids.
Jack's legs had to be in splints for the first week, and then in casts for a several more weeks – not an easy situation for an active, almost two-year-old boy. The trauma of the experience left its imprint on Jack's mom, too: she remained mostly homebound at that time so she could avoid what she perceived as the judgmental gaze of others and wrestled with guilt feelings about the accident.
"The good news is, he healed pretty quickly," said Bigelow. "He was walking on his casts after just a couple of weeks. And, after one month, things were pretty much back to normal."
Now that the hardship is over, Bigelow tries to look at the bright side. They have one crazy story to tell. They even kept Jack's bright green and blue casts as mementos.
Both Bigelow and the parents in the Winthrop University Hospital study try to do their part by educating other parents at the park about the possible dangers of lap sliding. "It's one of those scenarios when you think you are doing something completely fun and safe," said Bigelow. "Now I speak up to other parents, especially if their kids are in that age range. I tell them little limbs are small enough to get stuck in places, so they should hold their child's legs firmly in place if they are going to slide together."
