When Scott and Jessica Walker decided to take their young baby out with them for a lunch date, their plans went awry because their daughter just would not stop crying. Later, when Jessica Walker investigated her daughter’s leg, she screamed in shock when she discovered the cause.
There are few things as priceless and incredibly precious as a newborn baby. That’s why Canada’s parents, Scott and Jessica Walker, were absolutely smitten with their daughter, Molly, when they first laid eyes on her. She was not their firstborn, but they could already see that she would make a perfect playmate and little sister for 2-year-old Maya. However, that day, they were almost starting to regret the moment they had decided to have kids in the first place.
After 4 months of caring for their baby daughter, Scott and Jessica had become familiar with most of her moods. They could distinguish the hungry cry from the dirty nappy cry, and both parents knew how to soothe away the tears by feeding her, changing her, or rubbing her back to settle her. But as soon as they entered the restaurant and were seated at their table, Molly woke up and began to cry.
Scott and Jessica exchanged a look. Was this a case of Murphy’s Law—if anything can go wrong, it will? This was their first time out of the house since the baby had been born, and they didn’t want it to be ruined. They tried to ignore the annoyed looks and whispered conversations of diners at the surrounding tables, which seemed to be focused on their noisy infant. Scott and Jessica could hardly blame these people; they had not expected to spend their lunch with the sound of a screeching baby.
Jessica checked Molly’s diaper, which she had already changed just before they had left home, but it was still clean. That was one possibility ruled out. Although Molly had had her last feed just an hour earlier, her mom offered her a bottle, but the baby girl ignored that too. She just carried on crying.
“Is she going to cry the whole time?” 2-year-old Maya wanted to know.
“She doesn’t know how to tell us what’s bothering her,” Dad Scott explained. “Not like you, Maya. You’re such a clever girl. But I’m sure Mommy will figure it out in a bit.
“Do you think she’s teething?” Jess asked. She knew that babies start growing their first set of teeth around 4 months old, but she hadn’t expected her daughter to feel the first pangs of pain exactly during their first day out in months.
“Could be,” Scott agreed. “And of course, Miss Molly just had to pick the very auspicious occasion of our first meal out to be getting her first tooth.”
“Those little baby teeth can’t wait,” Jessica said. “Come on, baby, let Mommy take a look.” With Molly’s mouth wide open and her wails getting louder and louder, it was easy to prod around her gums.
“Do you feel anything?” Scott asked anxiously.
“Not a thing,” Jessica replied, and all the while, Molly still went on crying. By this time, both Scott and Jessica wished that they were back home, but they had already placed their meal order and had to wait for their food. Every minute felt like an eternity as they wondered whether they had checked everything, tried everything to soothe their baby, and done their best to ignore the angry, irritated looks on the faces of their fellow diners. Nobody had said anything so far, for which they were grateful, but this definitely wasn’t how they had planned the lunch to go.
Scott and Jessica each tried to calm Molly down, but nothing helped. They discussed back and forth what could possibly be the explanation behind their distress. Could it be that the strange sounds and smells of the restaurant itself were setting Molly off? Could this be the beginning of a cold? As the baby’s screams demanded all her parents’ attention, big sister Maya was also beginning to act up. She was tired of being the sensible one, and it was unfair that Molly was getting all the attention. Maya wanted help with every bite and was squirming around, looking like she might be planning her own little meltdown.
Scott and Jessica exchanged a glance. Clearly, they had the same thought: the situation was getting totally out of hand. Getting up, they decided to abandon the meals they had been looking forward to so much and head home. Scott hoped that his wife would be able to find the real cause of Molly’s distress once they were back in their own space again.
Once they were back in the car, Jessica noticed that Molly seemed to be running a fever, so she loosened the baby girl’s romper. That should cool her until they got home. Concerned, she wondered again whether Molly could be coming down with some as yet undiagnosed illness. Like her older sister, Molly had been born a little premature and therefore had to stay in the hospital for 3 weeks after the birth.
There wasn’t anything specifically wrong with her, but the healthcare team wanted to check that early development was on par and that no health complications were evident. Thankfully, young Molly was soon given a clean bill of health and allowed to go home with her parents. However, sometimes premature babies can be a little frail.
Being a nurse, Jessica had met her fair share of preemies who fell sick more than average. However, Molly seemed to be doing just fine. As soon as the little baby girl was home, the balancing act began for the parents. Having gone through the process of caring for a young baby once before with Maya, Scott and Jessica knew what to expect and felt much more confident in their role of caring for little Molly.
They drew up a routine to make sure that both parents at least got the chance of getting some sleep with the inevitable round-the-clock feeding and changing sessions. Scott was proud to be a fully hands-on dad, and after a while, the youngest member of the family settled into a routine of sorts.
As Molly got older and began to sleep for longer periods, it seemed as if they might be able to prepare for a romantic outing. Although this had to be organized in child-friendly surroundings and around the needs of their two little girls, they decided on a lunch date and Scott picked a suitable restaurant.
As the day of their special lunch date dawned, both girls were dressed up in adorable outfits. Scott and Jessica were very proud of their two beautiful daughters and couldn’t wait to show them off. They were also looking forward to enjoying a meal that no one had to cook and getting a night off from doing the dishes.
This was sure to be a treat for the whole family, and hopefully, little Molly, who was by now about 19 weeks old, would sleep peacefully in her walker for most of the afternoon. But unfortunately, their lunch plans hit an unexpected snag, and it would almost lead to a tragic complication for little Molly.
As soon as they got home, Scott and Jessica Walker rushed into action to deal with their baby girl’s fever. Jessica went into nurse mode and directed her husband to get a cold compress ready. Anxiously, they waited for it to take effect while Jessica watched over the baby. Scott rushed to put Maya to bed. Understandably, the little girl didn’t want to sleep at all. Her father’s anxious glances towards the door and her little sister’s cries didn’t help either. Scott could only hope that Jessica would be able to soothe the baby soon.
However, Molly’s fever was not abating as expected. It was at that moment that Jessica noticed something that would finally reveal the cause of Molly’s distress. The baby was still wearing her cute little baby socks. Molly’s entire body seemed racked with fever, and although Jess had loosened her clothing, those baby socks should have been the first to go.
After all, hands and feet are the first parts of our bodies that should be cooled down when our temperature rises abnormally. Under normal circumstances, she would have remembered that, but the baby’s incessant crying had turned her brain into mush, and she had completely forgotten. As Jessica Walker finally removed the baby socks, she could not help but notice how warm her daughter’s leg felt. And when she removed the last sock, she gave an involuntary scream of shock.
“What’s wrong?” Scott wanted to know at once, but when he saw Molly’s toe, he felt queasy. Molly’s feet were unnaturally red. This clearly showed how those cute baby socks had contributed to Molly’s discomfort. Jessica filled a basin with cool water to cool her daughter’s feet down, but then she noticed something even more disturbing.
One of Molly’s tiny toes looked horribly swollen, and when Jessica saw what caused it, she knew that there was no time to waste. In that moment of crisis, she became a supermom. In a calm voice, she gave Scott instructions on what to bring her. He rushed to the baby room and returned with a flashlight, a tweezer, and a small delicate pair of scissors.
Next, he ordered him to bring the magnifying glass from the kitchen cupboard. Looking through the magnifying glass, Jessica and Scott could finally see clearly what had caused the problem. They were shocked to discover that they had overlooked something seemingly insignificant but that had caused them so much trouble. If only they’d known this earlier, they could have avoided so many unnecessary tears.
A single hair had wrapped itself around one of Molly’s toes and was cutting deep into her flesh, disrupting the baby girl’s blood flow and causing her immense throbbing pain. It was also responsible for the fever that Jessica had first noticed in the car.
As a nurse, she knew exactly what had to be done. She instructed Scott to hold Molly still while she used the tweezers to cut that horrible offending hair from her daughter’s toe. It was a difficult procedure, and Jessica Walker drew on her experience in healthcare to get the hair safely cut. Molly stopped crying at once, which reassured her parents, but the swelling did not immediately go down. It took almost 45 minutes before the toe began to look somewhat normal again.
This problem that caused so much trouble was surprisingly common enough to have a medical name. It is commonly known as a hair tourniquet. Although its cause seems so insignificant, a hair tourniquet is a serious condition which could lead to tissue death or bone erosion if Jessica had not acted at once. Molly’s situation could have gone much, much worse.
If the swelling gets bad enough, the offending hair becomes so deeply embedded that it’s inaccessible, and in the most extreme cases, it might be necessary to amputate the stricken body part. Jessica said that she had seen a few similar types of incidents in her years of nursing, and as Scott hit Google to read up on it, he discovered more.
A hair tourniquet can affect both the toes or the fingers of an infant and can occur when the baby innocently reaches out to grab a piece of the person she loves most—a parent or a caregiver. After this hair-raising incident, Scott Walker also checked with Molly’s doctor to make sure that her toe had recovered properly from the ordeal.
The doctor commended Jessica for her quick thinking and for taking the appropriate action at once, which prevented the situation from getting worse. For the future, he advised the Walkers to always check the baby’s toes and fingers if she continued to cry and there was no other explanation.
Scott shared their experience with Molly on Facebook to alert other parents, nannies, and other caregivers of this potential hazard. In his post, he even linked to a helpful article on hair tourniquet cases. It is not only fingers and toes that can be endangered in this way, but also other delicate body parts. And of course, babies are unable to tell their parents where they are experiencing pain.
More than 50,000 people commented on Scott’s post, with some sharing similar experiences with their own kids or babies they were caring for. In some cases, the condition required surgery to correct. One person even warned that adults can be similarly impacted. Beauty professionals who work with their clients’ hair are especially at risk. Other commenters added that string, fiber, and thread can similarly endanger a young child.
Scott also shared an adorable “after” photo which showed how quickly Molly bounced back to her usual happy self after the hair tourniquet had been removed. The family might have lost their opportunity to dine out, but they learned an important lesson—one they would never forget.
And now it’s your turn. Have you ever heard of a hair tourniquet, or is this term totally new to you? What’s the first thing you check if your baby is crying?
