mrs catastrophe mom

I took Owen to a birthday party at a farm about a month ago and we went down a giant slide there. As soon as I climbed up the ladder and reached the look out deck (yes, it was that large) I got a bird's eye view of the slide and my stomach dropped. I was thinking 'oh no' visions of myself flying off the track of the Alpine Slide at Action Park in the 80's, landing scraped and bruised on the hay bale 'bumpers'. But I'm trying not to make Owen as big a chicken as myself, now that I'm older and see the potential risks in things as mundane as crossing the street. So I sat on the potato sack, put Owen between my legs, held him tightly with my whole body and shoved off. We hurtled down fast, at times lifting periously close to the outer edges of the slide, but we stayed in and got spit out on the very hard and muddy ground at the end of the slide. Trying to get up I felt all of my 37 years, my ass was instantly aching from the six foot skid across the ground. We got ourselves up, brushed off the mud and Owen looked at me, so sweet and serious. He said to me in a low voice 'I don't want to go on that slide again.' So we climbed up the hill and I reassured him that we didn't need to go on it again and that I knew how he felt. I thought nothing more of it until I saw him in profile and noticed the large, angry welt on the side of his face. Poor Owen wound up with a nasty scrape across his one cheek, I guess it was the result of a friction burn against the edge of the slide. Of course, I immediately felt guilty. Did I somehow inadvertently push poor Owen's face against the edge of the slide in order to keep us from flying out of it? Was he victimized as a result of my avoiding injury? I only had two tiny little burns on my wrist. Then I was wincing at the thought of the large screws & bold I'd noticed on the lookout deck that were used to hold the parts of the slide together. Thank God he hadn't scraped his cheek on one of those. And then I start thinking about necrotizing fasciitis (flesh eating disease), not the path most Mother's minds would take I know. But I'm recalling the story in Atul Gawande's 'Complications' about the man that DIED as a result of necrotizing fasciitis that started from a rug burn on the side of his torso. I'm sucked into the black hole of my negative thinking imagining the surgeries to try and save my son, the time in a hyperbaric chamber to and heal him but all for naught. My children seem to have afflicted me with an acute case of hypochondria by proxy. My mind loves to ruminate and torture me, no matter how hard I try to distract myself with normal thoughts, about the worst case scenario of any illness or injury that happens to my kids. When I say something to Toby and he shakes his head saying 'Honey, do you really worry about that?' I know that my thinking isn't typical. I'm not an idiot, I've known my thinking isn't the norm for quite awhile.