Maddie’s Tubes Surgery
July 3rd, 2009I’ve posted the album for Maddie’s Tubes Surgery (which includes a few more than you see below). Click on any of the photos in this post to see the entire album.
We gave Maddie a dose of Tylenol around 8pm the night before her surgery, and then we woke her up at 11:30pm to give her Motrin. She woke up just enough to swallow the medicine and went right back to sleep. We didn’t want to take any chances that she might wake up at 1am screaming for hours (like the previous night and many others with these nasty ear infections).
She miraculously slept in the crib until it was time to go to the hospital. Of course, we had to wake her up a little before 5am, but still…two months ago there’s no way she would have still been in the crib! We arrived at the hospital right at 5:30am. They were pretty quick about checking us in and getting us to the pre-op area. Once in the pre-op area, they gave us a baby gown and we waited for various nurses and doctors to visit with us and fill out paperwork.
We were worried about how we were going to entertain her for 2 hours (especially considering she wasn’t allowed to eat all morning). She never complained about food or drink. She was pretty calm, probably because she wasn’t quite awake yet! They had a playroom for the surgery kids that kept her entertained most of the time.
When the anesthesiologist came by, he recommended against the loopy meds that they give to little kids before the operation. It helps the kids with the transition to the operating room, but it can make the recovery harder. He felt like Maddie was calm enough and wouldn’t need it. He even did a trial and carried Maddie out of the room to see how she would react. She didn’t get upset at all!
They gave her a little mask similar to the one that they would use just before the surgery to make her sleep. She played with it for a little bit, and then they were ready for her to go to surgery! She cried just a little as they started to wheel her bed, but she recovered very quickly and was calm before she was out of our sight. She’s such a brave little girl!
We headed to the waiting room where we sat for less than 10 minutes. Everyone told us that the tubes surgery is really fast! We weren’t surprised when the doctor came by to let us know how everything went within 10 minutes. Maddie’s left ear was quite infected (not a surprise to Mommy - I knew that something was not right with my child, despite the pediatrician telling us that everything looked fine in there the previous morning). The ENT described a pretty gross scene in that ear and prescribed us with some additional drops to help with the infection and healing. After he described what he saw in her left ear, we felt even better about our decision to get the tubes.
It wasn’t too long afterwards that they paged us to the recovery room. I could hear my sweet baby girl before we entered the patient area. Poor thing! She was not having a good time. She was quite upset, and there wasn’t much that we could do to make her happy. I felt like it took forever for them to discharge us, but it was probably less than 30 minutes. Once we started walking towards the exit, Maddie was much happier. She smiled when she saw we were walking outside!
She fell asleep once we were moving in the car, and she slept for about 45 minutes. We knew that we would have a hard time getting her back to sleep, so I drove around while Gabe picked up some groceries. I’m glad we gave her a little extra time to sleep since she refused to nap the rest of the morning. She was tired, but we couldn’t convince her to nap until around 1pm.
After her nap, which was only about an hour and a half, she was a pretty happy baby! I posted a video yesterday to show how she was acting by the afternoon. You wouldn’t know that she had surgery that morning! We hope to see a big difference in Maddie with her overall mood, sleeping habits, and illnesses. Hopefully, the tubes will do the trick!