The First Surgery Award
July 2006
I’ve earned another badge to sew onto my parenting uniform.
Along side my decorations earned for surviving nursing, purging
the pacifier and shepherding in a couple dozen teeth is my shiny
“first surgery” award.
For about a year our pediatrician, Dr. Hobbs, had been mentioning
my daughter’s large tonsils, a near-constant pool of fluid in the
middle ear, and the perma-dark circles under her eyes—all
apparently correctable with surgery. While these observations didn’
t exactly fall on deaf ears, I’ll cop to a slight hearing impairment on
the matter; I couldn’t hear while rooting for spontaneous healing.
But after a holiday season which included more visits to our ped’s
office than to Santa, Dr. Hobbs handed me a business card of an
Ear Nose and Throat (ENT) doc and the kind directive, “Her tonsils
are gi’Normous; it’s time to talk to the specialist.”
Wearing huge 80’s-style headphones in a space-aged soundproof
test booth, my daughter was declared hearing impaired. “She’s
probably been getting by with some lip reading,” suggested the
audiologist. To have missed this is incredibly heart breaking.
Gerbils, with their cashew-sized brains, would have probably been
more perceptive and that stings.
Within fifteen minutes, we were walking out the door with a Children’
s Hospital appointment card for the “ENT Blue Plate Special”:
adenoidectomy, tonsillectomy and a sweet pair of ear tubes. I was
exhausted by this enormous day and it wasn’t even lunch.
We were tempted with a less intense “partial tonsillectomy” surgical
option, which - as it sounds - takes less of the actual tonsil making
for a significantly easier recovery. To my ears I heard: option 1.
Cut my baby. Option 2. Cut my baby less, woo-hoo!
The shortcoming (you knew there had to be one) is the tonsil
tissue could grow back and we could find ourselves in the same
spot in a few years - only with a kid missing a week or more of
middle school instead of preschool circle time. The chips stacked
up against it, both our surgeon and Dr. Hobbs endorsed the full-
monty and I reluctantly shuffled along.
Those of us who live in the Twin Cities do not thank our lucky stars
enough for the care facilities available to our families. Minneapolis
Children’s Hospital gives an excellent child-oriented, surgical tour.
The staff had the dozen or so assembled children put on scrubs,
facemasks, gloves and stethoscopes. They played with blood
pressure cuffs, anesthetic masks and even picked out the flavor
they wanted their “sleeping medicine” to smell like.
But when the visit wound us to the room where Abbie would
actually be put under, my throat bulged with swallowed tears. The
Big Bird cross-stitch on the wall did not alter the seriousness of this
room and anesthesia is no child’s play.
Leading up to the procedure, we kept busy. Abbie was taken
shopping to pick out any soda, ice cream, and popsicle product
that delighted her and then we loaded up on library DVDs. A pink
canopy was erected over her bed for our “pampered Princess” and
I unearthed the baby monitor to make it easier to ring up her
servants.
It was then I noticed the dead fish. It probably is bad form to let
loose a rash of expletives over the deceased, one Ms. Rosie
Raposie Pokla-Dot, but I was ticked at her timing. Truly, we try to
be straight up about things, but this was NOT the week for the
“Circle of Life” conversation. I dispatched my husband to locate
Rosie’s stunt double.
I had debated whether I should go into the “induction room” when it
was time for Abbie to be anesthetized. Being cradled by a sobbing
mother right before lights out didn’t strike me as a comfort, but
when it was time my composure surprised me.
The gas initially made her giggle-ly and I forced a smile back at
her. Then her eyes went unseeing, her skin-tone shallowed out
and for lack of a better term, she became dead weight. A staffer
whisked her out of my arms, instructed me to kiss her cheek and
ushered me out with a tissue. This was one of the single most
disturbing events I’ve participated in. No one should see their child
so lifeless.
Mercifully, the procedure was short and our round, restaurant-style
pager (given to us by Faye, a 25-year Children’s Hospital
volunteer) was buzzing within 45-minutes. Abbie Belle awoke
discombobulated, in pain. After she vomited, we started the
regimen of codeine, antibiotics, eardrops, Disney films and
popsicles that would be our week’s roadmap.
Driving home just six hours from our arrival, I sat anxiously in the
backseat next to Abbie’s car seat. It paralleled the day we first
brought her home as a newborn: Jason and I both hovering and
nervous, not knowing what to expect and hoping we wouldn’t screw
it up.
Abbie Belle was an expressionless heap of a girl during those
blurry first days. I remember the pain meds not seeing her through
the four hours, a nasty reaction to the antibiotic, bad advice from
the surgeon’s receptionist and waking up the on-call doc – twice. I
created a chalkboard chart to keep track of all the doses; their
timetables and whether Abbie had pee’d the magical twice a day to
stave off dehydration.
While I like to think we’re fairly high functioning people (despite the
occasional mismatched socks), Jason and I agree we were
challenged to our ends and regained our empathy for parents of
infants.
Four days later, Abbie was still not really talking because of throat
pain, but more mobile. I heard frantic knocking from the baby
monitor and rushed in to find her rapping hysterically on the
receiver with one hand and jutting a finger at the fish tank with the
other.
Inside was not the shimmery goldfish look-alike I’d requested, but a
big black stalking beta (which Jason later claimed was “just
cooler”). So we ’fessed up and apologized.
“We thought we had bigger things going on this week,” I said
lamely, “I was wrong and I’m sorry; I know that your fish was a big
deal to you.”
With her big forgiving heart, Abbie named the beta “Big Fish.”
