Surgery Recovery and Recap

I’ve mostly blogged about Tate’s surgery day, but here are the photos to show you what it was like.  My apologies if these are repeats—

First, here are our our “before” photos—

Tate at home, in his stroller during our admissions, running all over the waiting area (he didn’t last long in the stroller).  They called us back to pre-op shortly thereafter, which was unfortunate because then we had to be contained in a small area with pretty much no toys, and one “wall” was a curtain that Tate kept sneaking under.  Fortunately, our surgeons were ready early, so they took Tate back to surgery early.

  These are our “after” photos:  The first two are in our hospital room around 6:00 p.m. (a couple hours after surgery).  You can see that Tate’s cheeks are a bit puffy, and his mouth is oozy with blood.  It wasn’t pleasant to look at, but it wasn’t unexpected either.  They had “no nos” on him, which are soft bands that prevent him from bending his elbows and sticking things (like his fingers) in his mouth.

He did drink from a cup before he went down for the night.  We could not really get him to drink from a bottle.  I think his mouth was too sore, and he didn’t want the bottle in it.  We started out with Tylenol, and when he woke up a couple hours later, we went to ibuprofen, and then finally settled on some Tylenol with codeine.  That was around 4:00 a.m.  This picture is of Tate closer to 5:00 a.m.—his first post-surgery smile.  The Tylenol with codeine kick-started him being up, and then he wanted to walk all over the place.  We spent an hour or two just wandering the halls, he and I.  He’s pretty cute—and he sure wasn’t talking or making noise, so the nurses didn’t seem to mind.

 

I began texting Jason around 4:00 a.m.  Our plan had been for him to return to the hospital at 9:00 a.m.  But after a sleepless night, I wanted him to come earlier.  So my texts got increasingly desperate sounding.  Until, finally, at 6:00 a.m. or 7:00 a.m., Tate and I both fell fast asleep.  When Jason did arrive around 9:00 a.m., Tate was ready for his next dose of Tylenol with codeine.  We drove all over the halls in this car they had, which Tate loved.  And when the activity room opened at 10:00 a.m., Tate wandered in there—he loved it.  They had a ball popper and lots of instruments, which he loved playing with.  This purple gown was his second because of all the drooling—and he did get a third gown at one point in time—you can see how wet it got.

Tate did crash again for a bit, thankfully allowing us some rest. 

Tate woke up just in time for Dr. Holmes to check on us and discharge us a day early.  So here’s Tate ready to go (and you can see our room in the background), and then in the car. 

Marcie and Casey were playing with my mom, but so excited to see Tate.  Casey immediately shared Ali the Alligator, his class pet, which Casey got to bring home over the holiday break because Casey will be star student next week at school.  Tate wasn’t interested in Ali (or anything else, except me) all weekend.

 

Tate was mostly angry, angry, angry about not getting solids for the first couple days.  We were able to manage his pain pretty well, but not his hunger.  He’s on a full liquid diet for another two weeks, and they told us we’d have to feed him every couple hours—but we didn’t really anticipate that happening all night long.  Though it did.  All week long.  On Wednesday night, he lasted one three-hour stretch.  Our plastic surgeon was surprised by this—he thought Tate should be sleeping longer at night (he also said Tate’s mouth looks great!).  On Thursday night, it was every 3 hours.  And last night, he went a whole long stretch—like five hours!  So far tonight, he’s been down for four hours so far.  Fingers crossed he’ll sleep all night. . .

The first few times we were able to get a bottle into his mouth, he still crooked his finger, even with the no-nos on, like he was going to stick it in his mouth.  And a couple time she tried to “pretend” to hold his bottle, and then he’d try to stick his finger in his mouth while holding the bottle.  But he seems to have stopped doing that now.