Night / Day after Surgery

…so, a few hours turned into the whole night pretty quickly. Aspen did well without us last night, which is a relief. It is now 2:15 pm on Friday and I just got the password for the hospital internet, but can’t post because of their security. Elden is doing so much better, but we had a looooong, rough night with little to no sleep. He had to have a few more doses of morphine because he couldn’t keep the Tylenol or Motrin down. I would feed him and think “Yes! He’s eating!” and then he would just throw it up with the medicine they gave him. At this point, Elden had throw up on all of his and mommy’s clothes. My mom had to come bring us new clothes. I felt really discouraged this morning about it. All of the other babies have gotten to go home, and we are still trying to get Elden to eat. Poor thing, we just want him to be comfortable. His head became swollen. It may be hard to see from the photos, but it is swollen pretty wide to either side of his head, and it makes his ears droop down a lot. This is normal for the first 4 days, but still looks alarming to me. It is also hard to think about the space that is there now from the bone that was removed – I am afraid to touch it – to hurt him.

He is doing well – just uncomfortable and sometimes in pain. We are trying to keep the room dark and quiet for him. Even the slightest noise and movement seem to startle him. While nursing him, even the movement of my breath would upset him. We had several attempts throughout the day of feeding him, giving pain meds and he would get sick – so they had to give him more morphine. Our goal at this point is of course to get out of the hospital – get him to eat, poop, keep the meds down, get him off of the IV. Finally early afternoon, he woke up from a nap and seemed to feel better. I was able to feed him, and then give him Tylenol. All right – he kept it down! We narrowed it down to the Motrin being the culprit – making him sick.

Grandma, Papa Tony and Aspen came to visit. They had to wait in the ICU waiting area on the 8^th floor. Pat and I would take turns going down to see Aspen. She wanted to see her brother so bad and didn’t understand why she couldn’t. I would take photos and video of Elden and bring them down to show to her. That helped a little. Most times when I went back down the hallway to the elevators, I could here her crying “Mommy!”. Poor thing!

Dr. Jimenez came around 3:30 pm to check on us. At that point, I decided to hold Elden in my arms and walk him around. He seemed to be getting bored of the laying in bed position. Elden loves to be held upright to look around and check things out. As we were walking down the hall, Dr. Jimenez came through the double doors right in front of us. Elden took one look at him, gave him a big smile and laughed. At that point, Dr. Jimenez said we could go home if we felt comfortable with it. He mentioned that Elden had more swelling than normal – probably because he had to make so many more incisions in the bone to the sides of Elden’s head. Elden would have “dependent edema” for a few days which means that whichever direction his head was placed, the swelling would move in that direction. You can see from some of these photos that his ears look droopy and wide to the sides – because we had him upright, that was were the swelling was settling.

We were definitely ready to go!

Grandma, Papa Tony and Aspen came to pick us up and we left at 5 pm. Elden slept during the ride home. We were so tired, we just ate and then went to bed. Elden was great last night – he kept his normal schedule of waking up a few times to eat. I am getting used to holding him to nurse. And he is getting used to moving his head around again. I am sure it feels different to him. We gave him Tylenol or Motrin those times to control the pain, and he is doing great! The smiling photo of him in Pat’s arms with the animal pj’s on is from Sat. morning. Amazing!

We are just going to lay low this weekend to help him recover. We have our next head scan Monday morning at 8 am. We hope you are all doing well, thanks again for your prayers! We will post again early next week.