Like Father Like Daughter

Be forewarned, this is probably more info than you want.
When Ryan was young (10, I think?) he had the tip of one of his toes chopped off when a hatch on the houseboat got slammed down on it.
Yesterday evening, Ava nearly repeated that feat with her left ring finger. She climbed up on a dining chair and while my back was turned to put pasta in the boiling pot, she must have climbed up the back of the chair and tipped it over. I ran over and grabbed her but it took a minute for the bleeding to start. Since I found her face down I was looking all over her head for bleeding but there was nothing there. Then I saw her finger, her poor little finger. I can only assume that she landed with her finger in her mouth and her teeth cut through it from the top side, at the tip. I'll spare you the gory details, but it was pretty bad. I'm surprised at how panicky I got, I thought I would handle an emergency better than this. I called Ryan and told him she almost bit her finger off. He thought I said she did bite her finger off, and instructed me to call 911. My biggest lack of reasoning was that I couldn't figure out how to get her to the hospital. I knew I had to restrain her because she just wanted to grab it where it hurt. But who could get to my house immediately and get me there? (Duh, my sister, Jen, lives like a mile and a half away). Shoulda just skipped the 911, but I was kind of freaking out.
Fortunately Ryan sent Tyler right over, and I should have just had him take us to the hospital but an ambulance was already on it's way, so we had to wait for that. I was hoping they could fix her up, but they just wrapped her in a bandaid and said she needed to go to the ER. So rather than pay them to take me I opted to have Tyler drive us over (THANK YOU TYLER!!) since it wasn't a life-and-death situation. Ryan beat us there and fortunately there was no wait at all. But there was the end of a BYU game on... that did seem to slow the doctors down just a little. Really.
They gave her 2 shots in the finger to numb it, which appeared to be excruciating. Apparently when Ryan had his toe incident he said the shots were worse than the actual toe-chopping. X-rays showed that she broke the finger too, above the knuckle. Where she sliced through was right at the nail bed so with the stitches they also reattached the nail and it may or may not grow back. Hopefully she's young enough that it will. I mean it's her wedding ring finger--she'll probably care how that looks one day.
She had to be strapped down in a mummy board for the stitches, and we did our best, along with Grandma and Grandpa Cook, to distract her and entertain her, but it was not a fun time. When your child is crying in pain, the minutes just draaaag on. All in all, from fall to finish, it was about a 3 hour ordeal. Felt like 8.
And of course she got wrapped up in a blue bandage because the doctor just never seemed to hear us when we told him she is a girl. But her dressings will be changed tomorrow and I plan to ask for a bright pink bandage! Stitches come out in 10 days. Today I think I'm more traumatized than she is. She's on rotations of Tylenol and Advil (she likes the taste too), and seems to be back to her normal self, with just an occasional show of the hand and an "Oww" to remind us that something happened yesterday (no actual show of pain though).
I was hoping our first emergency wouldn't happen until she was at least five. But I'm grateful it wasn't worse—it could have been so much worse. And at least I never had to rush her back to the hospital after she left the NICU as a baby. And at least she's never had to be hospitalized for RSV. And at least she didn't knock her teeth out (like I did as a kid) or crack her head open, or totally lose the finger. So I'm grateful.