Winter Fun
Sledding Safety by Edwin King, MD and Felicia Finnegan, PA-C Originally published at www.thePediaBlog.com
True story: Walking through the woods with sleds in tow to a popular sledding hill in Frick Park, I was pelted with questions from my 5-year-old and 10-year-old. “Why do we have to wear helmets, nobody else wears helmets?!” The pediatrician’s logical explanation followed. Hearing this, the children, unimpressed, remained helmetless and disgruntled. As we approached the busy, massive, steep sledding hill, there was an ambulance at the top. The children, now quite silent, looked up to the ambulance, then looked back at me – repeatedly. I remained silent as we watched the stretcher being loaded into the ambulance. We asked a passerby what had happened. “Some sort of head injury, maybe concussion, maybe worse, they do not know.” The children quickly looked at me and then the ambulance a few more times, jaws agape. They scurried to put their helmets on as soon as they could, and have not questioned wearing helmets while sledding since that day.
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AHN Pediatrics • Winter 2021 • www.ahnpediatrics.org
