We're Home!

We're home from the hospital!

I'll give you a rundown of the past couple of days, as I see that Jer was a little skimpy on the details. We got a phone call yesterday morning at about 8:00 letting us know that there'd been a cancellation and our surgery time had been bumped up so we should bring Connor in as soon as we could. We threw ourselves and Connor into the car twenty minutes later, and were at the hospital by about 9:30. Jer's mom met us at the hospital armed with a balloon the size of Connor's entire body, and so we paraded back into surgical services. In the surgical prep area we stripped Connor and Monkey down and they both received ankle bands, a wash-up and gowns. Monkey's gown was made out of a paper towel and not nearly as nice as Connor's, but since I have yet to find enough free time to sew hospital gowns for a stuffed animal, we had to improvise. Then Connor and Monkey disappeared into the surgical area and we headed off to eat some lunch and wait for the doctor to page us and tell us the surgery was over.

Connor, by the way, was not upset about the upcoming surgery. Connor was upset that he was wearing shoes but no pants. We'd put the shoes back on to keep his feet warm, and this was apparently Against The Rules. "Sad, pants! Sad! Please, pants, please!" he kept signing. Also he didn't like the nurse's paper hat. Given some of the wardrobe choices I've made in the past, I'm not sure how I managed to raise a fashion critic. Maybe it skips generations or something.

After about two hours they paged us to tell us the surgery was over. The doctor sat down with us in one of the little rooms off the surgical unit and told us that everything had gone very well, though they'd hit a couple of snags. The first was that they'd had a little trouble intubating him-- it took a couple of tries, so his throat was probably going to be pretty sore. The second thing was that Connor has what's called pectus excavatum, or funnel chest, and so his ribs fall in such a way that the doctor had to make the incision to get to Connor's stomach much closer to the place where the g-tube comes out than it would usually be. Other than that, everything went very well. Shortly afterwards, they asked for me to come back to recovery as Connor needed comforting. They only allow one parent back at a time per HIPAA laws, as the room is open and has a lot of patients, and also to reduce the risk of infection. I followed the nurse back to recovery.

Connor, still pretty out of it due to the anesthetic and the morphine, was trussed out in arm restraints on the bed. Apparently he was upset enough he'd decided that breathing was optional, and whenever they took the oxygen mask away from his face his saturation levels plummeted. I told them that I'd watch his arms, and so we took him out of the restraints (which, I might point out, are a sign-dependent child's worst nightmare as they render the child unable to say anything) and I sat down with him in a rocking chair and the combination of me signing, rocking, and another hefty dose of morphine eventually got him to calm down. Jer snuck in and we bantered back and forth about how a non-doped up Connor would enact revenge on us and all of the doctors and nurses who had perpetuated this outrage upon him. We figured it would involve hired packs of assassin ninjas, or baring that, a judicious application of teeth to any body part within reach.

The recovery nurse was kind of interesting, by the way. She was very nice, but she started asking me questions about how I was "feeling about all of this-- not just the surgery, but just dealing with everything" and expressed admiration and amazement that Jer and I had not divorced because of having Connor. I didn't really know what to say to that, because the implication was that having Connor should be a tragedy, the kind that ends marriages, and to us having Connor is a joy. She gave me a huge bear hug as I was leaving, which was a little awkward for me, but I kind of patted her on the back and shared a raised-eyebrow look with Jer over her shoulder. I suspect the nurse thought she and I had shared some sort of intense moment together and I needed comforting, which was a little strange given that Jer and I were not only completely calm the entire time, but cracking jokes. Oh well.

Since Connor still didn't want to breath without the oxygen on, we ended up with a nasal cannula and they moved us to a room. Once we were settled in, Jer headed off to the house and left you all yesterday's extremely detailed report. Connor began phase one of his revenge plan by becoming nocturnal and also periodically expressing how he was Very Sad by holding his breath and causing all of his alarms to go off as a result, and so his Mommy got very little sleep.

Jer drove back up to the hospital in the morning, and by the afternoon Connor was completely off the oxygen and morphine. He was also much more chipper and communicative, playing a little bit with his blue Gertie ball and periodically patting his tummy near the g-tube while shaking his head "no," whenever he thought we didn't look sufficiently guilty at doing this to him. Nobody asked for his opinion about whether or not he thought a g-tube was necessary, but he was making it unequivocally clear what his answer would have been had we asked. It's hard to be two. Nobody asks your opinion on any of the important stuff like that.

So we were discharged around six in the evening and are now home. Connor is fast asleep, hooked up to his pump for his first ever nightly feeding, and I'm looking forward to playing a half-awake game of Rock, Paper, Scissors at five in the morning with Jer over who gets to go turn the pump off when its finished.

The little guy is doing just fine.

~Jess