Camping Part Two: What the???

As soon as we got out of the car at the campsite, I noticed that Trent had dried blood behind both ears. Weird. We knew it wasn't bug bites, because we hadn't been out of the car long enough, and too bizarre to have blood behind both ears. Bugs and mosquitoes are not concerned with keeping things symmetrical. So I wiped his ears off with a baby wipe, and saw that there were teeny-tiny pin prick type marks there. Hmmm.... We figured it was some kind of altitude phenomenon and went about our business.

About an hour later, I came upon Trent, sitting on a blanket with blood dripping from the corner of one eye and the lower lid of the other. Not a lot of blood, but still strange. That's when I said, "What the frick is going on??", and we loaded all the kids in the car to use the phone at the ranger station a few miles up the road.

At the ranger station, we found that the pay phone outside was not actually a pay phone, but a phone that was only to be used for collect and 911 calls only. Why? What is the point? So I went inside the station, asked them if they had heard of anything like this ever happening before? Could it be the altitude? (We were between 7,500 and 10,000 feet at that point.) They were baffled by my description, but suggested I drive to a lodge a few miles further down the road and ask if I could use their phone to call a doctor. Excuse me? Do you not have a phone here, or does a bleeding baby not constitute the type of emergency in which you would allow someone to use the ranger's phone?

I mumbled and cursed as I walked back to the car and told Andrew to drive towards Evanston, Wyoming until we could get a cell signal.

About twenty minutes later, we pulled over, made a bunch of calls; to my dad, he called a pediatrician for us since I couldn't hear very well on my phone, called Aunt Heidi who is the unfortunate recipient of all my unbelievable medical query telephone calls, tried to call Trent's pediatrician... In the end, we were told by the doc that is was possibly his capillaries popping or letting pressure out... ?? And that as long as he didn't act abnormally or fussy, and didn't bleed anymore, he would probably be fine. And he was. Trent is now tied for first place for the most baffling medical issues Andrew and I have dealt with as parents. His first place companion is Cameron, who once bled through his tear ducts. That, however, is another story entirely.