Pre-Surgery Countdown

Well, August is officially here and I can’t believe our biggest hurdle to date is only 27 days away.  On August 29th, Aleck goes in for hip surgery at the new Children’s Memorial downtown and we are all aflood with a variety of emotions.  Of course we are nervous, we want it to be a successful surgery, and with his condition there is a risk that his body won’t respond to the open reduction, and if that’s the case he’ll have a surgery like my dad’s where he’ll have to deal with cranky TSA agents and metal detectors for the rest of his life.  And the pain, oh the pain.  We will be in the hospital for 3-4 days just for the pain management, and will then have another 3-4 days of a baby in a lot of pain when we get home.  Not really sure how we are going to handle it, but whomever wants to sign up for “Pass the crying baby”, feel free to drop me a line, we’ll need all the help we can get.  Finally, there’s the cast.  We’ve got our bean bag chair (Thanks Alexis & Geordy), and it even has his name on it which makes everything so much cooler, and it’s going to be where he’s going to live for those six to eight weeks.  He’s already getting used to it and my therapists are just thrilled to have it, experimenting with different activities we can do while he’s in there.  I have a feeling that we’ll need to throw a tarp over it for feedings since he’s such a mess.  What I’m most nervous about the cast is changing his diaper and keeping it clean of pee and poop for such an extended time.  We had to deal with this a little bit when he was having his treatment for his club foot, but those casts were only on for one or two weeks, and only came up to his upper thigh, this puppy is a whole new ball game.

Personally I’m also really excited for the surgery.  If all goes well, and once the cast is taken off, we can really kick our therapies into high gear, working on crawling, working on walking, and maybe I can even carry him on my hip with his legs wrapped around me, which right now elicits screams of excruciating pain since that right hip is totally out of place. I’m also excited about being trapped in the hospital for a few days.  I’m exhausted.  My sister once equated my life to being in a spin class, but the instructor isn’t planning on giving any breaks until the entire class is over, I’m up with my tush off the seat for the entire class, or the entire year or two, with no rest in sight.  So the idea of being stuck in the hospital, no other place to go, nothing else to do, no house to clean, no ability to edit jobs, no “to-do” list in my head, no exercises to do with Aleck every day, no food to make, maybe even no bottles to prepare, no therapists-feeding specialists-nutritionists to make my bed for, it’s as close to a vacation as I’m going to get for a long time.

But before we head to the hospital we do need to get some things checked off our list.  Number one, we are having family pictures taken.  Nothing fancy, just images of the three us, especially since I have almost no pictures of Aleck and I.  The one on my Facebook page is about it, and that’s kind of sad.  It’s really hard for me to give up control of my family shoot to another photographer, but I’m lucky I found an old friend who was more than happy to do the favor.  I love her work and adore her energy so it should be a great time.  Weather permitting we’ll go to the park and squat on a blanket to play for an hour while she shoots, not too shabby.

Secondly, I want to have my hair done.  I haven’t seen the inside of a salon since February and who knows when I will afterwards, so lets get this mane of tri-colored, over worked, split end infested, super dry and lacking of any style, mane tamed, and I’m doing it before pictures, a one-two punch.  Unfortunately the girl I found while I was pregnant is out of town this week so I’m going to have to try out someone new.  The salon is close to my house and the stylists is recommended for curly hair, so how bad can it be?  Yikes. I’ve been known to break down and cry after many hair appointments.

Next Aleck is having his pre-surgery appointment with his doctor so we can go over the procedure again and any final questions we may have for the doctors.  This time I’m going to ask things like; Do I need to bring food for him?  Do I need to bring clothes for him or will he be in a hospital gown for those days? Do I need to bring diapers for him or will they have them there? What can I expect the days will be like after the surgery?  Will he be in bed all day hooked up to machines?  Will I be able to hold him?  Will the cast be changed during the recovery process (somewhere in those 6-8 weeks), How do I diaper him?  What do I need to look out for when I bring him home?  What positions can I put him in?  When will we get the stand to help him hold himself up?  When can we start using the stand?  My physical therapist is coming with me and I’m really excited for her to nail down what therapy we can do while he’s in the cast, and then what we can do as soon as the cast is off.  This way we are all ready to go when he gets home from the hospital.

Then there’s the issue of Aleck’s big toe on his right foot.  It’s been swollen for a while.  We’ve tried creams, we’ve tried soaks, we’ve tried digging out the corner of the nail on the toe, and right now we are trying antibiotics.  If his toe isn’t back to normal by Monday I’m going back to the doctor to have him figure out what is bothering him.  It could be a piece of nail stuck way down, and if that’s the case it needs to be dug out and all healed before surgery since they will be casting his entire foot as well since he won’t be able to wear his braces with his cast on (another thing to look forward to, no buckles for 6-8 weeks).  We certainly can’t have that foot casted with an infection, the last thing I need to do is make life worse for my little man.

In the middle of all of this Aleck was supposed to have a hearing test at 6 months.  Whoops.  I made the appointment and totally forgot and have been too embarrassed to call them.  Not that I’m the least bit worried about his hearing, there’s nothing wrong there.  He can hear Craig’s alarm clock go off in the morning, he wakes to the sound of our buzzer on our building, and even opens his eyes when he hears the creak of his own door opening in the middle of the night.  There is nothing wrong with this boy’s hearing, but because of the unknown issues of his condition, I’m supposed to go do this.  I think I can, I think I can, I think I can…oh just make the call already.

For therapies we’re still working to get those elbows bending as much as possible, increasing the bend in his splints about 5 degrees every week or so.  I’m seriously so sick of his elbow splints I could just throw them out the window.  Trying to squeeze 5 hours of wear everyday, looking for activities he can do with them on, having to make sure I get all non-splint exercises done before it’s splint time, it’s a ton of work and we are on a very tight schedule.  In the end, they get in the way of his natural movement and that kills me since he’s only got 27 days of movement left.  My OT is making a different pair that she thinks will allow for his natural movement a lot more, so I’m excited to get those, but also stressed, another set of splints to add into our schedule.

Working with the knees is a little more critical since they’ll be all wrapped up in the cast, but we are making headway.  PT is a lot more of an effort now and I have to pull out the Mommy show twice a week (we upped PT to 2x a week now), to help get him through.  Then he’s so tired he now goes down for a third nap, taking another hour away from awake time and time to splint and time to do therapies.  Whew.  But we can see his knees and the creases on the back of his legs and he’s even bending them a bit on his own as he now reaches up his leg inching his way towards his toes.

Lastly, we need to beef this little guy up as much as possible.  I haven’t talked about it in a while because even I’m sick of thinking about it, but feeding is still a huge issue.  Aleck still doesn’t finish most of his bottles, I’m giving him the same amount of formula I’ve been giving him since February, and since we only have 27 days to fatten those cheeks up, we are getting really creative over here.  I’ve found two different types of sippy cups that he is responding pretty well to which is a good start. However, neither one of them have that little nub at the top but are designed for him to drink open mouth allowing him to control the flow with his upper lip, and they both get all over him.  A new addition to our arsenal is a baby cup made by Baby Bjorn which is small, soft, and see through so I can see how much liquid is getting to his mouth to prevent choking.  So here’s how bottle time goes right now.  First I offer him his bottle in his room, in the glider, while he looks out the window.  He drinks what he wants, I burp him and try to coax as much more into him as I can.  Then I open up the bottle and try to have him drink a little that way.  Once he starts whining, we head to the kitchen for our solids and I pour some bottle into his food and into his baby cup.  After he starts refusing his baby cup, I pour the rest of his formula into a sippy cup.  In the end all of this extra work is getting me 1-2 additional ounces of formula into him at every feed, but by the time I’m done I’m ready to go to bed.  Then I add 1/3 scoop of formula to all his food, 1 tsp of olive oil to all his vegetables, and water to make sure it’s not too thick.  Because I’m sneaking formula into his food it makes pooping more difficult so I offer him his other sippy cup filled with cold water to try to keep him regular, and prunes every night before he goes to bed.  All of this work only added 1 oz of weight to Aleck over the course of a week.  1 flipping, freakin, bullshit of an ounce.  He’s 14 lbs, 11.5 oz as of Tuesday, and when we went in for his 9 month check-up the ped wasn’t too upset or worried about his weight, but he is concerned about his head size, talking to me about how important it is to keep the head and brain growing and developing.  Seriously, he should come over to my house and watch how this all goes down.  It’s kind of insane around here.

Definitely not the calm before the storm around here, but more like the storm before the storm.  I haven’t even thought much about life past the surgery, and I really don’t think I can.  It’s just too overwhelming.  So for now we are taking it one day at a time, trying to check everything off of our pre-surgery to-do list and getting work wrapped up as much as possible.  I kind of feel like I’m getting ready to have another baby, only this time I won’t be the one on the good painkillers.