Sunday, February 10, 2013

A 2012 review addition

I forgot something I don't want to forget in the 2012 review. In October Reagan got her tonsils out. Really I want to remember this because someday all my children's spouses will owe me big for giving them a husband or wife that is not the nightmare snorer that they would have been had we not gone through the major drama of taking out their tonsils. To my future children in-laws, your welcome. No matter what sort of crazy things I do as a mother-in-law, at least I did this for you. And I also helped put our ENT"s children through college.

As it was with the other three, the tonsils are a nightmare for a few days then it was over. But the few days are really not much fun. The story I want to remember, or actually I should try and forget, is leaving the hospital.

Reagan was hardly a cooperative patient. She hasn't been great in any doctor or dentist office yet, and so I knew the hospital would be even worse. With all three of the other kids we declined getting the pre-medicine, but I knew with her we would have to do it. I was right to not do it with anyone else because the waking up process was much worse.

She actually went back into surgery fine, the anesthesiologist put a Dora cartoon on his ipad and she had never seen Dora before and was memorized. It went downhill from there. While she was in surgery the nurse explained that when she came back she would have to do a series of things before being discharged including get up and walk and eat a popsicle.

Not long after, Dr. Wobig came out to tell us the surgery had gone great, and he was just shocked at the size of her tonsils and adenoids and he was so glad we took them out. A few minutes later they brought out a super sweet, sleepy little girl to us. Then she woke up.

As she was waking up she became very agitated. She did not want the pajamas on, but also didn't want hers put back on her. She certainly did not want the IV port in, yet didn't want the nurse to touch her. That was fun. She did take one bite out of the popsicle, and promptly spit it out at the nurse. Great parenting moment.

After about 45 minutes she was finally just fully screaming and thrashing around. The nurse said, I think you should just take her home. At that point she had completed a total of zero of the things the nurse originally said she needed to to do be released. That nurse, who was very nice, could not get us out of the quick enough. She handed us our discharge papers along with the post-surgery instructions and said over Reagan's screaming, "you've done this before so you don't need me to go over this with you. If you have any questions just call your doctors office."

We headed out with Andrew carrying our stuff and me carrying Reagan, and by the time we were out in the main hall before the elevators I couldn't physically hold her anymore. We switched and that totally put her over the edge. She was screaming, hitting, scratching, and trying to bite Andrew. She was in a crazy drug induced fit. We made it down the elevator and into the main atrium of Providence Hospital. That big room goes up multiple stories of open air and her screaming just echoed to a deafening level. Everyone, everywhere stopped to watch us, I'm sure they were looking at her to see which appendage had been removed from this child because that is the only explanation for the noises coming from her. Andrew and I just sort of shook our heads and laughed, because what else do you do.

Finally, we reached the car and had a bigger problem, getting her in her carseat. Two grown adults could not get a two year old in the carseat. She was so out of her mind and amazingly that translated into super-human strength. She made herself as straight as a board and we couldn't get her shoved down into the seat. I seriously worried that even if we got her in that the seat belt in her carseat might not hold her. Fortunately one time she stopped for a breath and we caught it at the right moment and were able to shove her little rear-end into the seat and get her in. She continued to scream for about 10 minutes and then almost instantly fell asleep.

Fortunately, the trip out was really the worst of it. The first two days were pretty okay, then days 3, 4, and 5 were pretty miserable and they slowly got better from there. All in all it took a good 10 days for her to get back to normal.

As I've said many times, I wish in our genetic soup we had created something else that was crazy amazing, rather than the size of the lumps of tissue in our kids sinus cavities, but at least it is something that is (relatively) easy to fix. I found on our hospital bills (I was more careful about checking them this time because our insurance is so bad now our deductible means we paid for most of it) that they charged us $17.85 for the half of a popsicle that they gave Reagan. The very one she only took one bite out of then spit at the nurse. We didn't get a surcharge for abusing the nurse, so I suppose I should be happy about that.

And now when you listen to Reagan sleep she doesn't sound like an old man. Success. Future spouse, you owe me awesome grandchildren.

2 comments:

Greg and Andrea said...

Loved the addition, and I, too, read every word of the 2012 review. :)

Traci K. said...

Tiffany, as always, you have quite a way of telling a story! I loved reading this. Too bad you don't have a video to show Reagan some day. It sounds like she owes you big time! :)