Molly's Surgery

 

We have had a really fun and busy summer and now we have to get back to business and get things taken care of before the school year starts. This time Molly got to go to the hospital to get her tonsils and adenoids out.  After a year of battling breathing issues, inhalers, crazy loud snoring, and infections, the surgeon and ENT took one look at her mouth and said we need to get these out right away.  No xrays and tests needed they could see the problem areas by just looking in her mouth. 

 

So after much coaxing and prepping on what was going to happen Molly reluctantly/cheerfully? made it to the hospial with us.  Molly is a much more sensitive patient, she refuses to watch Max have any procedures or pokes done and will polietly sit outside his room, bury her face and cry, Max will look at her like she is crazy and tell her to stop crying.  So this time we assured her that there wouldn't be any pokes for Molly and she thought it was pretty cool that it was her turn to go to the hospital all be herself with mom and dad.  She did really well  until we hit the bright lights of the sterile bright operating room full of lots of masked medical professionals and then she lost it.  Luckily we got to have one of my favorite pediatric anesthesiologists and she knew just what to do.  We covered her face with her favorite blankie so she couldn't see anything and then she turned on the gas and started pumping it through her blankie,  she knew Molly was a candy lover and pumped candy flavored gas through her blanket until we got her knocked out. 

 

Surgery went great, although she had a tough time waking up from the anesthesia they paged me in to the OR to find a highly comabative little girl with three men trying to hold her down and keep her from hurting herself and others, after big hugs from mom and two rounds of extra sedation we made it to recovery where Josh got to take over.

with her history of breathing problems they had asked that we spend the night for observation which normally isn't needed but they wanted to be on the safe side due to her history.  Although in the end once the tonsils were out, her airways were so much bigger and with the added sedation they felt comfortable sending her home in our care knowing she would be flying pretty high for the next 24 hours and trusting that we knew the warning signs of what to watch for. We promised to sleep with her and keep a very close eye on her and we got to go home, with instructions on how to handle the 3 different pain medications and dosing instructions for every 2-3 hours round the clock.  

 

Upon arriving home,  her first 24 hours went really well, with only a couple episodes of vomitting she even managed a few smiles while opening some of her surgery presents from family.  The doctors prepared us that the recovery takes awhile and generally gets worse before it gets better.  They asked that she be out of all activities for 2 weeks, days 3-5 were definately worse when the incisions began to scab over and were painful and itchy.  She would cough and rip the scabs off causing some bleeding, but she did really well as long as we kept up on all the pain meds, she was a pretty cuddly little patient and forced mom to take a break and enjoy some snuggles.