Update, one day post-op

July 6th, surgery day

3:30 pm.  My poor baby woke up just now and in a LOT of pain.  I felt so bad for him.  He’s on Pedialyte for now, so we gave him some morphine IV and that knocked him out again.  At least he’s resting comfortably.  Hopefully by the time it wears off, he’ll be on his formula again and we can start using oral pain meds.  He’ll be on scheduled Lortab for the next few days and then we’ll go to an as needed basis.  His lip repair looks so good, but between it and his circ, he’s really hurting.  L

8:30 pm.  Aaron continues to be in quite a bit of pain.  We’re using both morphine and Lortab and he’s pretty loopy.  He just thrashes back and forth.  He’s just moving his head back and forth now, but his pupils are tiny pinpricks.  However, his heart rate is finally dropping.  He’s down in the one-teens now instead of 140’s or 150’s.  And that was when he was “sleeping.”  I really hope we can get this pain under control.  That will be the deciding factor of when we can go home, because we can’t go home if he’s hurting this much.

9:30 pm.  I just read through the ABR report with the nurse (because I couldn’t remember some of the details).  Aaron’s right ear is worse than his left ear and he has mixed hearing loss.  This means that part of the loss comes from conductive loss, moving the sound into his brain through the eardrum and bones into the cochlea, and part comes from neurosensory, or the nerves themselves.  That part can’t be helped.  I’m sad for my little boy, that he will not, on this earth, be able to hear well all the beautiful sounds around us.  But the funny part is, I’m not as upset by this as I was when I found out that David, and then Jonathan, are colorblind.  I guess I’m at a different place now.  Then I had two boys who were normal and the thought of someone not growing up was completely foreign to me.  Now, I have a baby who, for all intents and purposes, is deaf.  Not hard of hearing, but deaf.  This is much more involved, serious, whatever you want to call it.  BUT, he is alive.  And that is something that most people, doctors and otherwise, did not think would be.  So I’m sad, but I’m not devastated.  We’ll just have to find a way to work through this latest challenge.  And someday, when he is resurrected, his hearing will be perfect too.  In the meantime, I will just enjoy every moment that I get to feel his perfect love.

Thursday, July 7 -- one day post-op

7:00 am.  Aaron is doing so much better this morning.  His last morphine was at 11:00 last night and he is resting so comfortably right now.  He’s dropped his oxygen usage and he looks so good.  He had a very quiet night.  Hopefully we’re over the worst of the pain and we can manage the rest with oral medication.  His face is still quite bruised and swollen, but the worst of that should be over by tomorrow.  Last night, I really wondered about being able to go home tonight.  Even with both morphine and Lortab, he was in so much pain.  I would stand next to him with one hand under him and the other patting his chest and he would be fairly calm.  But if I even paused to switch hands, he would start thrashing all over again.



Sleeping peacefully, sideways.  The contraption on hishead is his IV,
enclosed by half a cup.  I think it's supposed to keep him from
trying to yank it out.  Instead, he just grabs it somewhere else.

  

He’s so funny about his sleeping.  At home, he wiggles and squirms until he’s lying almost sideways in the cradle with his left foot, or sometimes both feet, sticking out of the side of the bed.  We keep trying to block his way because that’s right where the rocker is and we don’t want his foot to get hit.  Well, here, once he got wiggled down, on that same side, he fell asleep and has been resting comfortably ever since.

8:30 am.  Aaron is still resting peacefully.  His floor attending, Dr. Smith, has already come by to see him.  We’re waiting on plastic surgery to round on him and then we need to get his prescriptions.  It looks like we’ll be out of here, hopefully, by noon.  He is doing so much better today.