Getting tubes

You may or may not know that Elizabeth has basically been sick since I started back to work. She got a cold the weekend before I started (November 9, to be exact) and has not had more than about 10 days of feeling well since. She's had two stomach bugs, a couple sinus infections, croup, bronchiolitis, and 4-5 ear infections. The worst of it has been the ear infections. Every time she gets a cold it turns into an ear infection, which leads to antibiotics, which leads to diarrhea, which leads to a terrible diaper rash - and this all comes with a serious sleeping problem. I say four or five ear infections because we're never quite sure if they go away and she gets new ones, or if it's just the same infection continuing on. With the most recent ear infection, she took a basic antibiotic followed by a stronger antibiotic followed by antibiotic shots followed by another strong antibiotic - and then 5 days later started the strong antibiotic again.

Fortunately, in the midst of this last ear infection cycle, we took her to the ENT and got her scheduled to get tubes. It was honestly one of the easiest parenting decisions we've made. Life was miserable with her being constantly sick, I was almost out of sick days at work (I have one left) and she was using way more than her fair share of antibiotics and contributing the drug-resistant strains of bacteria causing so much concern in the medical world.

So on the Thursday of Spring Break, I took her in for tubes. Ryan was still at his conference in San Antonio, so I got to take her alone and text him every half hour or so with updates. Our day started off at 6 am. Elizabeth had been wheezing for a few weeks, the residual effects of her bronchiolitis, so she was taking an inhaled steroid twice a day, along with Albuterol as needed. They wouldn't do the surgery if she was wheezing that morning, because of concerns about the general anesthesia, so I had to do her breathing treatments before we headed to the hospital. Elizabeth was a little confused about why she was up so early. Here she is on the way to the hospital, still dark outside.

When we got there, she enjoyed watching the fish in the aquarium. I love that almost all pediatric offices have aquariums.

Once we got back to the pre-op area, we had almost an hour to wait, so Elizabeth passed the time by first chewing the cover off one of her books, then wandering around to the other families waiting to be taken back. She especially liked one family with a three-year-old red-headed girl. Elizabeth kept walking me over to them and babbling at them. She ended up walking right up the dad and putting her arms up to be picked up. He held her in his lap for a few minutes and she loved it, babbling at him, his wife, and both the kids with them. Once they left, she took me over to another family with a boy about her age. He had thick curly black hair, her favorite kind to pull, so our visit with them didn't last very long :-/ Here she is with her book, and her hospital bracelet.

Once she got taken back, it was over very quickly. From the time they started, to when they came to get me, only about 7 minutes passed. I got to see her earlier than they'd said I would because when they gave her ibuprofen when they finished, she thought it was food and remembered that she hadn't eaten breakfast yet. She was half-awake and crying when I got to her, and didn't settle down until she was eating.

Her ENT told me that they had found some VERY thick fluid behind her ear drums, more of a paste than a fluid, which was what had been causing the persistent infections. Without tubes, she wouldn't have gotten better - nice to know we made the right call.

We were able to go home about 30 minutes after her surgery. Aside from some marks on her face from the mask they'd used to put her under, she was just fine. Here she is on the way home, just looking a little worn out:

For the rest of the day, you wouldn't even know she'd been through surgery. She played with her toys, napped and ate normally, and at bedtime, went right to sleep.

She'd definitely acquired some bad habits from the months of being sick. She'd been waking up for an hour or two at a time every night, and eating once and sometimes twice in the middle of the night. It took almost two weeks to get her sleeping through the night again, after she started feeling better.

Now though, she's sleeping better than ever - from 7 pm to 7 am - and hasn't been sick in 3 weeks, except for some allergy sniffles. I've stopped worrying every time she sneezes that she's getting a cold that will lead to an ear infection.

It seems like every phase is SO long with babies. When she was sick, it felt like she'd always been sick, even though it was only for about 3 and a half months. And now that she's healthy, I hardly remember the sleepless nights worrying about her. It feels like the sleeping and relaxing at night is the most normal thing in the world. I know it probably won't last, but it sure is nice for now.