Tubes in Ears

Some day I hope to be able to blog about the happenings in my life when they actually occur. The point of this blog is more a journal for myself since there is no way I can actually keep a written one successfully for more than a couple of months/days. Anyway, on to the story.

Evelynn went to the doctor last month because she was ornery and couldn't hear my frantic attempts to yell at her across the house when I needed her (meaning, she was hard of hearing and I was frustrated. Please see a previous blog posts for details). Surprise surprise, the doctor found that she had another ear infection. This time I was prepared with questions, well actually, just one question. "Do you think she needs tubes in her ears?"The doctor said that he usually recommends tubes to patients who have had ear infections 5 times for more in a year, so he went through her records, and this infection was # 5 for the year. How convenient. We made an appointment with the ear doctor (he has a formal title that is huge, and I can't pronounce it or spell it, so whatever) and he took pictures of Evelynn's ears. He was surprised to see she had another ear infection at the appointment, just one month since the appointment with her pediatrician. He said he was going to tell us to wait, but that ear infection decided it. So 3 weeks later on Sept 17th we went in for surgery for ear tubes.

We had to get up at 6:00 to get ready to go to the hospital because her surgery was scheduled for 7:00, which really means that they get you there before 7 and have you doing stuff until the surgery really starts at 8:30. That's a long time for a little girl to be nervous and scared! Evelynn did pretty well while we filled out paper work, got her weighed, measured, blood pressure pulse taken etc etc since it was very similar to a normal doctors appointment. She got some stickers after that, which in some ways made things worse because she thought we were all ready to go home since at the normal doctors office they do their thing, give her stickers and then we leave. Not so this time. We were led into a small room with a hospital bed and a TV and some chairs, and she started to get really nervous. She kept asking me if we could go home and sleep in her bed. For some reason that hospital bed terrified her. She would not get in it, much less sit in it or touch it. We got hospital jammies and had to put them on, which she didn't want to do because we had brought her special princess jammies just to make her feel better. After we got changed, I calmed her down enough to watch cartoons and wait for the doctor. But as soon as the anesthesiologist came into the room, Evelynn lost it. I was holding her trying to talk to the doctor and she kept sobbing "I want to go home and sleep in my bed! Can I go home?' The doctor tried to comfort her by saying "You can go home after you eat a Popsicle. Do you want a Popsicle?" She looked right at him and addressed him directly, saying "I want go go home. I'll go to sleep in my bed but please I want to go home!" I was shocked. She never addresses strange men directly, never never, so this showed me the extent of her terror and desire to leave. The doctor told the nurse to give her some medicine that was supposed to make her relax.... it didn't. The nurse came to take her to surgery and was surprised to find her still up and actively clinging to me and crying. She tried to take her from me to walk her down to surgery, and Evelynn would have none of it. The nurse could not even hold her. So I asked if I could walk her down. We walked through the surgery doors to the surgery nurses station and then two nurses had to carry her down the hall to the surgery. She screamed the whole way down the hall, "Mommy! I want to go home! MOMMY!!!" It broke my heart. I cried right there in the hallway. I composed myself on the way back to the room and sat down to wait for the doctor to come in.

The doctor who did the surgery was the same man we saw in the doctors office some weeks before. He came in about 15 minutes later (yeah the surgery takes 5 minutes start to finish) and told me that Evelynn had calmed down after she got into the room and was almost passive as they got her prepped and gassed and everything. He said he did the left ear just fine, but low and behold the right ear had another infection when he went to do that one. Big surprise. He sucked out all the gunk and put the tube in and told me it would leak gunk for a few days and I would have to put drops in her ear. They also told me that Tylenol was all she would need foe the pain. Evelynn came back totally out of it. Some kids come back screaming (I had heard a few while waiting) but not my girl. It was more like she was very very drunk. Usually recovery is 30 minutes, but we had to stay twice that long because Evelynn couldn't even sit up until almost 50 minutes. After she was mostly recovered and I told her we were going home, she got really excited. Earlier I had bribed her with McDonalds if she would get on the hospital bed by herself, which never happened, but she remembered McDonalds as we were getting ready and invited the nurse to come with us. The nurse declined, but I think she did want to go. Getting to the car was interesting because she kept falling over, even while I was holding her. But we got home just fine, and she perked right up once she saw our house and realized it was really all over. As for pain, I forgot that she could be in any pain until much later in the day, when I had to put drops in her ears. I asked her if she had an owie anywhere, and she pointed to her knee which she had skinned the day before. I asked if her ears hurt, and she said "No, I have an owie on my knee, not my ears!" Yes, I do have one tough kid. So after a nap and a trip to McDonalds the surgery was all forgotten. I found out later that tubes are only supposed to last 18-24 months, which is disappointing because I don't want to have to go through that again so soon if the ear infections start again!