Well, I wasn’t planning on posting until after the new year because I figured with the holidays, life would be pretty uneventful. I was wrong. If you follow James on Facebook, you know that James went in for surgery on Tuesday (which was supposed to be an outpatient procedure), had a little complication, and ended up spending the night at the hospital. This is just a recap of that experience.
One of James’ ear tubes was working its way out of the ear canal, so the ENT wanted to replace both of them. Because James would be under anesthesia for this procedure, we decided to also have one of his testicles removed at the same time. When James was born it was discovered that his left testicle hadn’t fully descended into the scrotum. He had surgery in February of 2011 to bring it down and tack it into place. We were warned ahead of time that the tacks might not hold, and the testicle might go back up. And that’s exactly what it did. The only other option was to have it removed. As a guy, I squirm every time we discuss removing one of his balls. Even thinking about it makes me cringe. Girls have no idea how much pain there is when a guy gets “knocked in the nuts”. Just the thought of cutting one out invokes a pain response. Since he was going to be under to have the new ear tubes put in, we decided to have the testicle removed at the same time, instead of doing it as a separate surgery. Kind of like a 2-for-1 deal.
Surgery was scheduled for Tuesday the 23rd at 10:45 am. I’m not really sure why we decided to do the surgery two days before Christmas, but we did. If we had a chance to do this over again, I probably would have waited until after Christmas. We also would have preferred to have the surgery done at the hospital that is close to our house (more on this below), but since our ENT wasn’t out of that hospital, we really didn’t have a choice. We had to have the procedure done at the hospital that he is affiliated with.
We got to the hospital at 9:45, an hour before surgery, like we were supposed to. As we were waiting to be called back to prep for surgery, the hospital gave James a little—okay a big—gift.
Stacy wanted to name it Milkshake. I was thinking Jingle Balls would be a more fitting name. You know, because it was the holidays and James was about to have one of his balls removed. As you have probably guessed, I was overruled, and we named it Milkshake.
Shortly after James was given the rather large stuffed animal, he was called to get prepped for surgery. The nurse went through the normal pre-surgery checklist, took vitals, and asked us to get him changed into a gown.
The doctors and anesthesiologist stopped by to go over the procedures. The first part of the surgery, the ear tubes, would take about thirty minutes, and then they would move on to removing the testicle. They said that the operating rooms were running a little behind schedule, but they would get James in as soon as possible.
They finally took him back at around 11:45, a full hour after his scheduled surgery time. Poor kid was crying as he was being wheeled away. I would probably be crying, too, if I knew they were about to remove one of my nuts!
I don’t know if this is the right word to use, but there was a bit of a complication during surgery. We got a call that he spiked a 104-degree fever while in surgery and the anesthesiologist wanted to pull him out. They asked us what we wanted to do. They had already started the testicle removal process and were relatively close to being done, so we told them that if the fever doesn’t go any higher, then continue with the surgery. Fortunately, the fever didn’t get above 104 and they were able to finish the surgery. Because of the fever, they wanted to keep him for observation to see if they could get the fever to break before they sent him home. They couldn’t get the fever to break in recovery, so they admitted him for the night.
After he was settled in his room, they ordered a chest x-ray and blood work to see if they could figure out what was causing the fever. While we were waiting for the x-ray and blood to be drawn, Stacy was giving James some suction and noticed that one of his teeth was looser than it had been. He lost his first tooth in November and there were two more that we were waiting to fall out. After she finished suctioning, Stacy was wiggling one of those loose teeth and got it to fall out. He is now missing both of his bottom front teeth.
We weren’t sure if the Tooth Fairy was allowed to make rounds at the hospital so we brought it home for her (or is it a him) to pick up.
Shortly after Stacy got the tooth to fall out, the results came back for the X-ray and bloodwork. The X-ray was clear, so he didn’t have pneumonia, and nothing showed up in the bloodwork. The treatment was simply antibiotics to prevent any possible infection from the surgery and pain-reliever/fever-reducer for the fever.
While we were at one of the best hospitals in the area, it does have a couple of drawbacks. It’s not close to home, and there is a Portillo’s staring at us right across the street. If you’re from the Chicago area, you know how the latter can be a bad thing. Their food is so good, but not healthy by any means. I had seen an article recently about a kid who was in the hospital in a room that faced a busy street. They put up a sign in the window that had their room number and “Send Pizza” written on it. Somebody saw the sign and had pizzas sent to their room.
I thought that was an awesome idea, so I decided to do something similar. I posted on my Facebook page the hospital we were at, the room number and “send Portillos”. I actually posted it to be silly, as I could easily just walk across the street to get food and bring it back, but we had three friends nearby that offered to pick up food for us. We really have some awesome friends. We placed our order and had our food in about 30 minutes. I should note that by this time it was 7:00 pm and we were hungry! Cheeseburger and fries for Stacy; chicken sandwich and fries for me. So good!
Shortly after Stacy and I scarfed down our dinner, they checked James’ temperature, and it was down to normal…98.6. Woo hoo! They still wanted to keep him overnight for observation, which was fine. It was 8 pm, it was a long day, and we were tired. Besides, his pediatrician, who works at the hospital, wanted to pop in and see him in the morning.
We probably should have requested to leave Tuesday night when James’ fever was gone. Wednesday morning it was back up to 103.8! WTF?! We thought for sure they were going to keep James for another day. It was Christmas Eve, and we really didn’t want to spend Christmas in the hospital. We know that James’ health is the most important thing, but if it was something we could manage at home, we think he would be more comfortable there. Fortunately, when the pediatrician came by, he was on our side. He sent us home with a prescription for an antibiotic, Tamiflu, and oxygen.
We got home late afternoon on Wednesday and spent a nice quiet Christmas at home. James needed to rest and finish recovering. Stacy and I needed to do the same.
