CHOP Day 4 (belated) - operation day!

What a lllloooonnnngggg day yesterday!

I was too tired to blog by the end of the day...I was nodding-off in the chair next to his crib by 9:30 last night...

The good news is that the intubation went MUCH better than back in April . Henry's airway is still small and physically difficult to deal with but there were not the extreme problems we dealt with last time.

His ears were cleaned out and his ear tubes replaced... Well, the left one was replaced, the doc could not FIND the right one, it probably came out with the major discharge he had once we got home... The right ear was also very infected so we are on antibiotics and the special ear drops for 10 days (again)...

The g-tube is in and this morning is doing well after a bit of extra bleeding yesterday..... I will be going to attend a "training" later today to learn how to feed him using it... We will do daytime feeding using the tube over the next 5 days until he can have puréed foods... This restriction is from the cleft repair, which also went well, but his mouth tissue was rather fragile. He had extra bleeding from the mouth as well that also kept him up in the OR for a bit longer than expected...

Once we got up to the PICU we had some challenges getting his pain under control while NOT suppressing his breathing....

And then they neglected to put in a second IV line for his antibiotics in the OR... The first tech who tried at the bedside could not get it in after 4 sticks (AARRGGHH!!)... The second tech finally got the line in his foot...

By 8 pm Henry was finally comfortable and that was when I started to crash... I was able to sleep from 9:30 until midnight, then Henry woke me up and I sang to and snuggled with him a bit and he went back to sleep... Then we slept again until 4am when Henry needed more pain meds... And then up for the day at 6am as the docs started parading in through the room to check him for the morning...

It is now 8am and Henry is sleeping peacefully at the moment!! The bleeding has really slowed down and his cleft repair and g-tube both look good according to the docs, they will try a feed through the g-tube later today...

I decided not to share a post-surgery pic just yet because he is still a bit bloody and "beat-up" looking, so instead you get a pic from yesterday, right before we went back to the Oar, playing and being silly with mommy...

I like Henry THIS way much better... Hopefully a few more days we will be back to this happy "normal"...

Since