Surgery for Case

Case was born with a herniated bellybutton. Basically, he's had an outtie. The dr. told us that most of these hernias fix themselves by the time the child turns 2. 2 came and went for us and we didn't see any progress on it fixing itself. The dr. then said it would fix by the time he was 3. Well, Case turns 3 in 2 weeks and it still hasn't fixed so we decided to have surgery and get it taken care of. Of course, we were planning on doing this before baby Siahna came, but since she arrived early it didn't happen exactly as planned. We had the surgery scheduled for a month ago, but Case got sick and they couldn't operate. Since my due date wasn't until June 13, we scheduled it for June 8 thinking this would give us time to have him recovered before the baby came.

Well, anyway, Tuesday was his surgery date. I had tried to prepare him in advance, but you can only prepare a 3 year old so much. We were brought to the pre-surgery room and the nurse asked us to put the rocket gown on Case and the funny looking hat. This is when I knew we'd have a long day. He refused to take off his clothes, no matter what we tried to bribe him with. We finally got his shirt off but that's all the progress we could make in 30 minutes. Yeah, we're his parents and we could have just forced the issue, but he's very stubborn, very independent, and very strong (can't wait till he's a teenager!). The dr. finally came in and said that we'd have to drug him up to make him more cooperative. It worked like a charm. It was like my 2 year old was drunk. It was pretty funny and he was so sweet and obedient. We really wish we could bring some of that home. :)

Jeff went back into surgery with Case until they put him under. We then waited about an hour for surgery to be done. The dr. came out and told us that everything went well and he was in the recovery room and they'd come get us as soon as he started to wake up. The nurse came and got Jeff and me shortly after that and as we were walking to his bed I knew we were in for it. He was just starting to wake, but was already trying to crawl out of his bed. We then grabbed him and moved him to a chair when he discovered the IV in his wrist and started screaming and trying to pull it out. It took both Jeff and I to hold him down. He also had an oxygen reader attached to his toe and once he saw that he really started screaming and trying to pull that off as well. We tried to hold him down and after about 20 minutes the nurse finally decided to pull out the IV and take off the oxygen reader. Thank you.

He then calmed down but was very uncooperative and in quite a bit of pain. After spending an hour with him in recovery we were finally told that we could go home. The nurse sat with us and told us how to take care of his bellybutton and that he couldn't remove the bandages until the next day. Well, of course, Case hears that and starts putting 2 and 2 together and realizes that yes he does have something on his bellybutton which is why it hurts. This starts a new round of battles as he tries to rip off the bandages. I swear, I have a multi-personality child sometimes. We do finally get him calmed enough to leave the bandages on and get him home where he chills and watches TV for the rest of the day.

He's recovered now, but I sure am glad that it's over and we don't have to deal with that again. Why oh why didn't we do this years ago when he was too little to understand or fight us? Pictures to come when I get new batteries for the camera.