A Real-life Ralphie

If you have ever seen “A Christmas Story,” you know the line “You’ll shoot your eye out.” Nearly every authority figure in the movie says it over and over again to the main character, a fourth-grade boy named Ralphie who wants a BB gun for Christmas. Ralphie ends up getting his wish and actually does shoot himself in the eye when a BB ricochets off of a metal target.

Since the movie is a comedy, it would be easy to dismiss the incident as contrived. But 9-year-old Lane Foreman of Eustace, Texas, knows better.

“I know it really happens,” he said. “Because it nearly happened to me.”

Lane was playing with a BB gun over the holidays when one of his shots ricocheted off of a tree stump and hit him in the right eye. His family rushed him to a nearby emergency room, but his injury looked so bad that the staff decided he needed to be seen by pediatric trauma specialists. So, they referred him to Children’s.

“I thought he was going to lose his eye,” Lane’s mother, Tammy Foreman, said. “I thought he was going to be blind.”

Treat BB guns like ‘real’ gunsStories like Lane’s fortunately don't happen every day at Children’s. In 2010, there were 15 patients admitted to our Trauma service for gun-related incidents. Out of those 15, six involved BB guns.

However, Claudia Romo, the program manager for Injury Prevention at Children’s, still thinks parents should be especially cautious with allowing their children to use BB guns.

“All BB guns aren’t the same,” Romo said. “Some are more powerful than others. And young children lack the developmental and coordination skills to assess danger and handle some of these powerful guns.”

Romo said that she advises parents not to buy BB guns for children younger than 14 but also understands that some parents will anyway.

"If parents are still going to buy them, then they should make sure their children wear protective gear like goggles and a vest,” she said. “They should also store the BB guns in gun safes or lockboxes if they have children of different age ranges. Treat them like real guns.”

No permanent damage for Lane
Lucky for Lane, his eyelid caught most of the BB that hit him and prevented permanent damage to his eyeball. He may need future surgery but is expected to completely recover.

The biggest worry he has now is that he misses being at Children’s.

“He told me the other day that he missed the room service and nurses,” Tammy said. “He took a picture with his nurses to show off to his buddies once he got back home.”

Lane is also informally educating other children about gun safety. He’s even using “A Christmas Story” as a teaching tool.

“When we went to a doctor’s office recently, he went up to a little kid and told him that movie is a great example of why you don’t need to be playing with BB guns,” Tammy said.

Talking about tragedies

In light of the recent shooting tragedy in Tucson and the one-year anniversary of the Haiti earthquake, parents should be prepared to talk to their children about these events.

In fact, First Lady Michelle Obama has penned an eloquent letter to parents that offers some insights into talking with your children about tragedies such as Tucson.

Pete Stavinoha, Ph.D., a child neuropsychologist at Children’s Medical Center in Dallas, says these events provide a starting point for discussions with your children. But, these are also subjects that could raise anxieties in children who see the images on TV or hear about them on the radio or the Internet, so it is important to monitor their time listening to, watching and interacting with the news.

Tips for talking to children

Stavinoha suggests parents:

• Listen to children and encourage them to ask questions at their own level of understanding. It’s OK to say you don’t know all the answers. It’s also OK not to overwhelm them with information that they may not understand.


• Pay attention to younger children’s play and drawings. They may give you a clue about what they are feeling or what they know about these tragedies. This may provide the opportunity to talk about it and perhaps clarify their questions.


• Don’t downplay the seriousness of the situation. Especially for older children, it is important to acknowledge the significance of the event.


• Model healthy parental coping during stressful times. This does not mean hiding your feelings, but rather staying aware of your reactions and showing your children how you deal with a tragedy in a healthy manner.


• Participate in activities that help put you and your children back in control of the otherwise disturbing situation such as attending prayer services.


• Seek support from family, friends, church or other social and emotional supports.

If your child is old enough, watch news reports or read the news together to encourage conversation about the topic. PBS has age-appropriate guidelines about how much news children should be watching and what they will understand about the news that are helpful.

Standing for the first time

Fifteen-month-old Mya Saysanam stood for the first time a few weeks ago. I know because I saw it happen while I was interviewing her family.

Although I wouldn't usually pay much attention to the first stand of any child who wasn't my own, this instance struck me as particularly momentous.

Liver experts at Children's diagnosed Mya with acute liver failure when she was 4 months old. The diagnosis shocked her parents.

In the span of a couple of days, they went from thinking she was completely healthy to not knowing if she would live to see her first birthday, much less stand on her own.

"I went numb when I found out," Mya's father, Sye Saysanam, said.

Children's was the best place to come
There is nothing good about that news for any parent, but if there was any bright spot to be found, it was that Mya came to Children's. As the only pediatric liver transplant facility in North Texas, Children's was the only place near Mya's home in Fort Worth that had the staff with the expertise to treat her condition.

And her condition deteriorated quickly. Just a few weeks after her diagnosis, her liver lost the capacity to function on its own. She had to be admitted to Children's until she could get a transplant, and no one knew for sure when that would be - a month, a year or even longer.

"They gave us a pager to alert us when she received a new organ," Sye said. "I couldn't take my eyes off of it."

"We just prayed and prayed and prayed," her mother, Krista Ketnourath, said.

Brief wait leads to permanent memories
The wait fortunately was short. A perfectly sized liver for Mya became available only two weeks after her admission. Drs. Dev Desai and Meelie Debroy took her in for surgery at midnight.

After staying up all night, Mya's parents saw their daughter emerge from surgery at 8 a.m. It was the first time they had ever seen her with a healthy liver.

"I'll always remember the first time she opened her eyes in ICU and they weren't yellow anymore," said Krista. "I always thought she was a beautiful child, but after that, I just thought, 'Oh my gosh, she really is beautiful.'"

And Krista said she will also never forget seeing Mya stand for the first time and what that symbolized.

"Now she has a new life," she said. "Now she's going to grow up."