Fine. It's 2:32. Mommy. Three fingers. Sleepy.

This was a variation of the conversation I had with Tori every two hours Monday night. There is nothing worse than one of your children hurting.

It started innocently enough. Eight glorious feet of snow fell up at Tahoe over five days. We skied. We sledded. We had snowball fights. We made snow angels. We caught snowflakes on our tongues. We watched the icicles on our roof line grow to 15 inches wide and two stories long. And then one of us reached out and touched one. And down it came with a vengeance, on her head.

The sound of your child's scream is like the sound of a car accident: a sound you never forget and one that brings your heart rate from zero to sixty faster than your neighbor's Porsche. I took the stairs two at a time and brought my daughter inside, where she cried for the next 45 minutes. We held her and gave her Tylenol. Finally her cries dulled to moans and we fled the mountains.

An hour into our trip home I texted my favorite pediatric neurosurgeon, also known as Cousin Hal, with the facts. He texted back: ED ASAP. CAT SCAN.

Next: a call to a friend in Sacramento to find out which hospital to take her to. She recommended Sutter Roseville and the reviews on Yelp confirmed it was a top notch facility with a large, efficiently run ED. When we arrived 20 minutes later the ED waiting room looked like a war zone. There were people with bloody head wounds, limbs askew and on and on. Although the triage nurse was very nice, all that gore was freaking us out so we hopped back in the car and continued south.

Finally we arrived at John Muir, our local trauma center, and the hospital where all Three Pinks were born. A wonderful PA named Robin Chastain examined Tori and advised against the scan, telling us that the neuro exam did not warrant the amount of radiation the scan would expose her to. I explained to her that my cousin had advised it. She said, "Do you mind me consulting with him?" And then they were on the phone.

Finally, 7.5 hours after we left Tahoe, we were pulled into our garage. Tired does not even begin to describe how I felt, how we all felt.

And now my baby is back to her normal, active self.