Mother Stands for Comfort

It seems like I've been away for eons. Sitting in a hospital, doing nothing but waiting, gives you a unique perspective on time--you are so bored that every minute takes forever, yet a day passes before you can blink. I had it easy, for I at least was able to go to work and keep my mind occupied; MLW got to experience just about every excruciating second of the mini-Beach Ghost's stay.

And, believe me, parts of it were excruciating. When I wrote in my previous entry that her first night out of surgery was the roughest that was true--at the time. The actual, honest-to-goodness roughest night was last Saturday, when she was beginning to be weaned from the medication.

In the middle of the night she began to struggle out of the medically necessary stupor she'd been plunged into. This led to a little coughing, a little crying, and a little...chest popping.

Yup, that's not a typo. Whenever she took in a deep breath, or coughed, or gave a particularly lustful cry, her chest would...pop. You could hear it from a couple feet away and, worse yet, you could feel it. Of course, this started happening at around 3 o'clock in the morning, so needless to say there was nothing we could do about it. Not that we didn't try. We managed to get the Fellow on staff to take a listen. We soon found out why this particular Fellow was working the graveyard shift, because he quickly pronounced that "he'd never heard anything like this before." I informed the man that that was precisely what we didn't need to hear at that moment. Since the issue didn't appear to be emergent, nothing was done at that point.

What we were able to find out on Sunday was the Beach Ghostlette had probably loosened one of the stitches that were holding her sternum together. What we found out on Monday, after they had performed a second operation to fix the problem, was that it was also causing her a considerable deal of discomfort. Fortunately, the period to get her back to where she was before she had to go under the second time was considerably shorter.

One thing that MLW discovered would ease the baby's evening discomfort was getting into to the bed with her and holding her. Unfortunately, they'd transferred the baby to a "climbing crib," so MLW had to squeeze herself into something that was only four feet long. I'd think it funny, if not for the underlying pathos of it: our girl was out of sorts and just wanted to be comforted.

From there, things have steadily improved. The mini-BG came home on Thursday afternoon and has slowly begun reverting to her usual, jolly self. The only noticable change, aside from a slightly quicker tendancy to go from calm to Warp Factor Cranky at the drop of a hat, is her tendency to eat even more. Even this is good news, as she needed to up her intake anyway.

A couple weeks before the surgery was scheduled, the Beach Ghostlette's cardiologist was discussing the process with MLW and noted that children receive an amnesiac with their anesthesia so that they don't remember anything about it afterwards. But, he said, he wished that they were able to prescribe them to the children's parents, as they were the ones who really could use it.

I, for one, heartily agree.