Adventures in Motherhood

Since my last post, life as a Mommy has been....interesting, to say the least. I am happy to say that for the most part, I think things are going to settle down now in 2009. Happy New Year, by the way!
Daughter had the unfortunate luck to catch the chicken pox just 2 days before Christmas Break. That meant she had to miss a fun day with her class at an indoor amusement place, a reward they had won for selling a lot in a fundraiser, and the next day of school, which would have been her class Christmas party. She was understandably crushed when she was told she would have to miss these, plus the evening performance of her school Christmas pageant. Her disappointment was nothing compared to her discomfort over the next few days. She ended up with a bad case of them. We were dotting her with calamine lotion, and counting them as we went. The first day produced somewhere around 200. When she woke up the next morning, we counted 1015, and that was not including the ones all through her hair, inside her mouth, and in places nobody is supposed to look or touch but herself. We stopped counting after that because it would have been easier to just get a big paintbrush and paint her pink with the stuff, but I would venture a guess that she probably made it up to 1500 before she started to scab. Poor thing was wild with itchiness in every conceivable part of her body. She was spoiled rotten during that time when she was quarantined (about 4 days), and couldn't really enjoy it much. he took a lot of baths in an effort to do SOMETHING for her...baking soda baths, oatmeal baths, a combination of the two bath, an epsom salt bath. She looks much better now with just the occasional scab here and there.
This ties in with Son very tightly. Just a few weeks before that,I received a phone call saying he had a surgery date. I believe I wrote about that in a previous blog post. If not, the following pre-surgery interview phone call was quite funny....very definitely a form written for anybody and everybody, and it gave me quite a chuckle as the nurse on the phone rattled off the questions, without really thinking about their relevancy. Everything from "Is he potty trained" to "does he have any problems with drug abuse", "does he smoke", etc. Oh, yes, Ma'am, my 4 year old is a smokin', drinkin', ladies' man! :)
So anyway, his surgery date was a mere 13 days away when Daughter broke out in spots. He was whisked away in the dark, as soon as we saw the spots on Daughter, on a 2 hour car ride, to stay with his grandparents for 4 and a bit days, in the wild hope that he would not get the chicken pox, since that would take him off the surgery list and put him back on the waiting list for a year or more. We waited and watched with baited breath, hoping an praying that nary a spot would emerge.
We made it. On December 30, 2008, at 2PM, Son had surgery to repair a submucous cleft. The night before, I had rummaged through the internet, looking for any and all info on the procedure, recovery info, anything, and ended up in tears as I realized what my son was going to be going through. But I also knew it was necessary. I was brave for my little guy. He went bouncing into that hospital, all happy and proud of himself, announcing to everybody that he was having surgery today to fix his throat and that he was going to have a really sore throat after, but he was going to talk better. We had done what we could to explain it all to him so that he understood what was happening and what to expect....but there's only so much a 4 year old can grasp.
We had to be at the hospital at 11AM....3 hours before the actual surgery. That was one boring 3 hour wait. He was shown to a little room, changed into his hospital jammies, I was asked a few questions, and we waited....and waited...they did not provide him with toys or anything. Luckily I had brought a few for the overnight stay....unfortunately, the long wait meant he was done reading and playing with everything long before he even had the surgery, so needed new stuff for afterwards.
At about 4PM, the surgeon came out and told me the surgery had gone wonderfully, and told me what to expect and how to feed him and all that sort of stuff. And then walked off, leaving me wondering where I could find my son, and when I could see him. About 10 minutes later, I managed to catch a nurse who was able to direct me to the appropriate floor and room number, so I went there, and got settled...and waited....and waited. Husband, Daughter, and my In-Laws showed up at the room....still no Son. Finally somewhere around 5, I guess, he was rolled in, eyes wide with pain and druggedness. Poor guy had bloody drool leaking out of the corner of his mouth, the inside of which was so swollen his lips did not close. He had quite a miserable night, wavering from painful awakeness to drugged and snoring sleep. Poor guy had the nurses coming in every 20 minutes to check his vitals or give him more medicine, so it was a very disjointed night. We were reading Thomas the Tank Engine stories at midnight, and playing with cars in the middle of the night. At least the room was kind of a neat place to be...we had our own room with a sliding glass door. There was a sink, a closet for his clothes and my jacket and stuff, a big armchair that was once a recliner, but now did not recline, the hospital bed with buttons to electrically adjust him to a sitting or reclining position, a bathroom with a huge bathtub in it, and a really cool window platform...like a window seat, but big enough to sleep on...about the size of a double bed, but in the shape of the bay window. Very cool. Our longest stretch of disjointed sleep with him being relatively calm was in the middle of the night when he had been crying because he wanted me to sleep in his bed with him, and the nurses, bless them, shifted things around to move him out of the hospital bed and onto the window shelf so we could lie together under the blankets....no small feat with all his tubes from the IV and the splints on his arms to keep him from sticking his fingers in his mouth. The IV machine had to be plugged into the plug in the bathroom and wired over to the bed. That resulted in us not being able to fully close our bathroom door if anybody except him had to use it, but the nurses were discreet and there was the ever-present curtain by the bed that we just pulled closed when we went in there, both as a signal and as a deterrent to the roving eye of anybody passing by the room at those moments. (The wall facing the hallway, with the sliding door, was glass) He settled down a bit after they did that for him, and we had the fun of looking back at all the pigeons peeking back in at us at the window in the morning.
My heart broke a million times that night. Every time the nurses came in, they tried to get him to drink. They had those medicine syringes that only hold maybe a teaspoon of water at a time, and would put that in his mouth...most of the time he would only get a drop of it down, the rest of it spilling out of his mouth, and when he DID manage to swallow, it was with such a grimace of pain that it made you want to promise he'd never have to do it again. After they made him swallow twice in a row, he'd make a sound that was him TRYING to say "OWWWW". :( They kept telling him that the water would make him feel better. After about the tenth time, after they had left, he looked at me, started to cry, and said as best he could "the water ISN'T helping!". I wanted to just sweep him into my arms and rock him and make him feel better....but all I could do for him at that time was to stroke his hair and face. I felt so helpless.
The surgeon came in at about 7:30 in the morning to see how he was doing. Compared to the night, he was doing a bit better. The doctor asked if he wanted breakfast, to which Son promptly replied "Ice cream and Jello". And that is what he got. The surgeon had brought that one on himself....before the surgery, he came in to talk to us, and told Son that after his surgery that these were what he would be able to eat, meaning that he would be in no shape for, say, cheeseburgers. Here we discovered the true challenge of the day after the repair of a submucous cleft. Ice cream in a little cup and jello in a little bowl, most kids could polish those off in about 5 minutes. Combined. It took him about half an hour to get the little ice cream cup down (about 1/4 cup worth), even once it was ice cream soup. The jello he worked at for about an hour, and never did finish it. He ate about 1/3 cup of jello, I think. If that. The surgeon said if he could drink enough, he could go home later that day. The poor kid ended up with a tray that looked like a line of shots by lunchtime. He had been accumulating them, trying desperately to drink sips from one or the other. By about 1PM, he had a bowl of soup, a bowl of pudding, another cup of ice cream, a glass of chocolate milk, a glass of peach juice, a carton of orange juice, and a carton of white milk sitting in front of him, and a look of bewildered desperation on his face. He finally decided he'd rather not go home. LOL. I don't blame him. I guess he thought he'd have to swallow all of those, and then go home and sit in bed with nothing to do.
The nurse came in and asked him to point to the two he liked best. He pointed to the pudding and the ice cream. She told him if he could finish those, then he could go home. When I told him he could sit or lie on the couch and watch movies or play Wii, he decided that might be worth the effort. So at about 2PM, the ice cream and pudding were gone, he'd managed about 1/4 of the glass of chocolate milk, was freshly drugged and we changed him, packed him and his stuff, and brought him home.
I have to backtrack just for a minute. I must tell you that out children's ward nurses are wonderful. They spoiled him like crazy. When he was first wheeled in, he was given a Christmas bag of presents. That bag had 3 little teddy bears, a plush gopher with a toque and scarf, a Giant Tiger slinky, and a toy carpenter tool set. A little later, the night staff came in, and brought him a gorgeous toy car, about 20cm in length, probably a '70's model, which had doors that opened, a trunk that opened, and a hood that opened to reveal a detailed engine. For a guy who loves toy cars, this was a great surprise.
After filling his prescriptions (poor guy has 4 meds to take), we took him home and planted him on the couch where he watched a movie, ate jello, and fell fast asleep for a few hours. He woke up sad and sore. We managed to keep him relatively occupied to get his mind off the pain between drinks and medication, but he was still really sore. He got to bed around 10PM, and slept until 9:15 this morning. He was supposed to get some pain meds in the middle of the night, but there was no way we were going to wake him out of a deep sleep, back to the world of pain, just to give him that and to have him not be able to get back to sleep. We gave him a whistle to blow if he woke up in pain, and he blew that this morning, when I was just outside his room, so he got his meds right away, and seems to be doing okay, though he was sore and very sad until the pain meds kicked in. Now he's going to have baby food for breakfast. We were told he can move up to mashed potatoes in a week, if he's up to it, so in the meantime, I have an abundance of cream soups, pudding, ice cream, jello, and things like that....and a new blender to create more.
My parents talked to him on the phone last night and said that, even with the swelling and all, they can already hear a difference in his quality of speech. This is great....hopefully when the swelling goes down (we were told this could take 10 weeks), his speech will still be as good as what they hear. I can't tell the difference yet, being the Mommy, but I'm sure I'll be able to tell later whether what I hear is from the swelling or from the repair. And in 3 months, we go back to speech therapy....if he needs it. You never know. He may just do the speech adjustments on his own.