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Tue, Mar 29, 2005 8:00 PM
We're All Recovered

The week after Henry is home from the hospital, Stephen, Libby, and I all get a viral infection. Libby is diagnosed with RSV/bronchitis/ear infection and receives antibiotics. Henry is sick, but only seems to have a runny nose and slight cough. Stephen and I are told to tough it out.

So -- we have a post operative baby and a very sick baby and two sick parents. No one sleeps for the entire week. We are reminded of how lucky we are that our babies sleep through the night and we are also of how glad we are the twins are no longer 3 weeks old or colicky.

Grandma Priddy makes a visit and helps Stephen catch up on some sleep and get out to do errands during the day. She stays for 6 days and gets to see the full-on cuteness.

As of Easter Sunday, we're all feeling much better.

Henry is now crawling all over the house and Libby is not far behind (mostly rolling...some crawling). Henry's favorite activity is taking books and papers off second shelves and ripping pages from books. His favorite book is "Pregnancy Week-by-Week", preferred even over "Snuggle Puppy" and "Mother Goose". What can you do? Henry is very verbal already and has a particular affinity for the cat. He says "tee" when he sees the cat -- which must be his version of "kitty cat". He seems to understand that items have names and will try to immitate what you say if you name an item.

Libby is the sweetest little girl. She adores her brother and constantly seeks his attention. She is much less mobile than Henry, but does enjoy her "Libby Dance" which involves moving her upper body and head to music. Libby loves to play with balls and her Daddy recently bought her tennis balls to play with. She rolls them and loves to play roll ball with her mom and dad. Libby says Momma and Dadda and burbles long, unintelligible sentences. She's a happy, smiling baby and enjoys cuddling.

Their favorite food is still avocado. They particularly like yogurt and avocado. We're experimenting with chicken and vegetables that mom makes homemade. Cheerios is still their all time favorite.

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Sun, Mar 6, 2005 8:19 PM
Henry's Surgery is Successful

We got to the hospital at 7:00AM on Thursday and got Henry into the pediatric surgery check-in room. We filled out paperwork and were quickly ushered into the pre-op room where about 7 other families were there with small babies, kids, and teenagers preparing for surgery. We met several nurses, the anesthesiology team, and the residents assisting Dr. Park (our urologist).

Mid-way through our pre-op consult, a nurse hands us a magic marker and asks us to mark Henry where the surgery will be performed. Keep in mind that I've read on many documents that this is a LEFT UPJ obstruction, but I have never confirmed this via ultrasound and I have no darn idea where Henry's kidneys would be. Knowing that this is another medical malpractice prevention method, I tell the residents that they are the ones that have his file and that THEY should mark it! Holy cow....

Anyway, about an hour after we get the pre-op, Libby starts getting fussy and Stephen takes her to the waiting room. Soon after, the anesthesiologist comes to get Henry and takes him into the OR. She was pretty and he was ooogling her -- so as she was walking away with Henry, he seemed happy and was not crying. I cried all the way to the waiting room.

Stephen, L. and I get to the waiting room and the waiting room attendent calls us to the phone. It's Dr. Park. He wants to know if we want Henry circumsized! He said that many parents wait and would be disappointed if he came out of surgery with a foreskin. I nervously tell Dr. Park that no, we don't want Henry circumsized and how surprised we are with the call. Dr. Park laughs and says, that's a good answer and he'll leave well enough alone. Holy cow! Could you imagine putting your little guy through Kidney surgery and having him wake up with his little willy sore too?

The surgery was really LONG -- 3 hours long. Libby is not able to get a morning nap and was in rare form.

They finally call us around 1PM to come back to the post operative recovery room and see Henry as he's waking up, right before they wheel him upstairs to his room. He looks so helpless and sick and pale. He doesn't open his eyes, but we can tell he can hear us. They unhook him from all the monitors and he gets wheeled up to the 6th floor and we follow.

When we get upstairs he is given more morphine via his IV (in his hand) and he goes right to sleep again. The room is about the size of our bathroom and we're sharing it with a 7 year old and his parents. Close quarters. Turns out, the check-in papers say that Henry is 9 years old, not 9 months old and we've been wrongly paired. All afternoon, the roomate has visitors coming in -- he also has the TV up full blast and is playing video games while the TV is on. Henry gets up around 3PM and can't get back to sleep from the noise. I complain to the nurse and they tell me there's nothing they can do. Grrrrr....

Stephen leaves to go home with Libby around 4pm. We now understand the importance of schedules because Libby is just totally off her schedule and making a total menace of herself. Henry is awake and very obviously in pain and wants me to hold him. I sit in a rocking chair from 3PM to 10PM without moving. He falls in and out of sleep and whimpers a lot if I move. The nurses keep the morphine coming and I grumble loudly to the nurses about the loudness, so that the next door neighbors hear me! They decide to have a family reunion in the evening and pack about 20 people in the room while Henry is trying to sleep.

Around 10, I leave to go get some food in the cafeteria. A nursing student helps me by holding Henry while I leave. He was fine when I came back, but the process of moving him from her lap to mine must have hurt him and he cried and screamed for several hours. It wasn't time for more morphine, so we just had to tough it out. I was crying, Henry was crying, and we just rocked and rocked. Finally, around 3AM, he was able to have more morphine and we could put him in the crib and I got to have about two hours of sleep before it started all over again.

I have to say that the worst part was around 7:30AM on Friday morning -- Henry was fussy and still on my lap, but the door was slightly open and as the residents/doctors start making rounds, the whole floor starting crying. All these babies were crying "momma, make it stop" and "momma hurt!" and I just about put Henry down and went running out the door. It was just the worst -- I couldn't wait for Stephen to get here and relieve me. Several days of little sleep and feeling so guilty about Henry had gotten to me.

The rest of Friday was a blur. I decided to let Stephen take a shift and Libby and I went for a long walk around the hospital. We got a hotel room in the hospital (nice!) and went for an afternoon nap. Friday's drama was that Henry's IVs kept infiltrating. They had to remove the one in his left arm and do one in his right arm. About 6 hours later, that one went, and they put one in his foot. He wasn't peeing enough through the catheter, so they had to bolster the IV drip he was getting. Luckily, he was on so many painkillers that the IVs didn't seem to hurt him much. I was so thankful that the IV lady got him on the first poke each time that I hugged her.

Around 7:30, Libby and I had dinner in the cafeteria, went up to the room and had a bath together, and hit the sack and let Dad take the night shift. I didn't sleep well at all, but at least Libby got some rest and I got to lay down, which felt good.

Doctors came in on Saturday AM around 7:30 -- Libby and I were up and in the room -- and they said that Henry could go home. IV came out, catheter came out, and we packed Henry up and took him home.

He was on Tylenol 3 with codeine yesterday, but has been on Motrin all day Sunday and is doing great. He finally took a bottle this afternoon and drank 10 ounces in one setting. We got him to take a bottle by giving Libby one in front of him -- he grabbed it off her and stuck it in his mouth. He's been eating like a champ and is smiling and cooing, although he is much more clingy to me than usual. (I don't mind!)

The last trauma is Thursday when he gets the drainage tube out. It doesn't feel very good and is followed by 2-3 stitches. We'll be dosing him up for that event.

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