post surgery

It feels like Anna's surgery was so long ago but it's only been one week.  Tony took her to her one-week follow up visit with the doctor and he said everything looks great, which is a huge relief.  I used to have another picture of her sleeping the night of her surgery, but every time I looked at it, it made me sad, so I took it off this posting.




Anna with the tube in her nose and the stitch in her tongue - you can see the thread from her mouth to her cheek.

The surgery itself went very well.  If you're ever in need of plastic surgery, I have the doctor for you.  He is amazing and everyone I've talked to says the same thing.  He said that before he started the surgery, he read a bit from Anna's file to everyone in the operating room.  He said that everyone heard her story and just melted.  How is THAT for a caring doctor? 


Tony and I were in the hospital waiting for about 6 hours total with pre-op.  It was a long day and I was a bit anxious even knowing she was in capable hands.  When they called me to post-op, I could hear her crying (actually screaming) from down the hall.  She was extremely distressed and was thrashing about which is not what you want a post-operative patient to be doing.  With tears running down my cheeks, another nurse and I held down my daughter as best we could while I talked to her.  Nothing was working and they ended up giving her some morphine.  She started calming down and so I held out my arms to her, she held her arms up to me, I picked her up and she just melted in my lap and fell asleep.



Anna the next morning - no tube, no stitch!


I thought about all she's been through in her short eighteen months and it broke my heart for the hundredth time.  In addition to the hard palate prosthetic and the soft palate repair, they put a tube in her nose to make sure her airway passage remained open and a stitch in the front of her tongue with the string attached and glued to her cheek just in case her tongue rolled back and blocked her passage way.  ouch.

But after the initial disorientation after waking up from her surgery, she was ok.  In fact, she was great.  She drank some water and ate some applesauce and yogurt that night and even more the next day (did I mention that this girl loves to eat?!).  They said she might have trouble eating, but I never doubted my Anna.

Anyway, around mid-day last Wednesday they discharged us and we were home by 2pm.  Since then, she's been doing great.  She hates those arm braces, yet, when I go to put them back on her arms (after bathing or exercising), she will hold her arms out to me so I can put them back on.

So all in all, she's doing great.  She can sort of hold her bottle, but she ends up pushing it hard into her mouth so I don't let her feed herself.  She hates this and has regular fits, but she is getting used to it. 

But as you can see, no arm brace is going to keep this little girl from climbing and her other shenanigans!