I can now breath a sigh of relief

My precious baby, Zany Janie, had to have surgery yesterday. Granted it was a minor surgery, but it was surgery none-the-less. She had to have the excision of her upper lip frenulum and minor tongue tie released. We were instructed that Zany Janie could not eat for 12 hours prior to the surgery. This would not be a big deal had the surgery been scheduled early morning, but it became a big deal when we realized that she would not have surgery until 12:30PM. She actually handled not eating better than I probably would have dealt with starving. Thankfully Grandma B and Auntie Kai came to watch Wacky Zacky so Papa Z and I could focus all our attention on Zany Janie.

We had to be at the hospital at 10:30 AM where they quickly put us in a pre-surgery room with 7 other patients. Only a curtain of fabric separated us from the next patient. I can only imagine the other anxiously waiting patient’s thoughts as they had to listen to a starving baby crying one moment and shrieking with glee the next as they patiently waited for their operation. As we walked into our little cubby I almost lost it when I saw the hospital crib. Have you ever seen the cribs they use in hospitals? They look like monkey cages in a zoo! They have steel bars that cover all sides including the top of the crib. Papa Z said, “It’s just what we put her in at night, but we call it by a different name.” Fortunately for us Zany Janie loved this new cage-I mean crib-and frolicked about for a long time. They had us put Zany Janie in peach pants that were big enough that Wacky Zacky could have worn them and an infant hospital gown. She looked hilarious in her outfit. I was bummed that I had forgotten to bring a camera. After the newness of the cubby and crib wore off, Zany Janie became fidgety and irritable. I’m not sure what the hospital was thinking having us there so early. For those of you that are parents, you know having a hungry baby in a small confined place for well over 2 hours is a recipe for disaster!

Zany Janie freaked out when the RN tried to take her pulse and check her ears. I just thought, “Wow! If she’s upset about this I can’t imagine how she will be after the surgery”. The anesthesiologist met with us and put even more fear into me as he discussed gas masks, IVs, and breathing tubes. The staff did win points with Zany Janie when they gave her a piece of the gas mask to play with. That helped keep her entertained for awhile longer. They were going to give her a sedative so she would be relaxed and would not fight as much when they gave her the gas, but fortunately she fell asleep in my arms before the surgery, so it wasn’t needed.

I cannot even begin to tell you the sick feeling I felt when they took her from my arms and walked into the other room. You just never know what will happen during surgery, even if it’s a minor one. I had a thought that kept ruminating in my head that I couldn’t shake, but I didn’t tell anyone-not my SAHM friends, not my sister whom I tell everything, and not even Papa Z. This will sound so odd, but I kept thinking about my sister’s cat that had a routine dental cleaning done on her teeth and woke up deaf and mildly retarded from the gas. Papa Z and I went to the waiting room and anxiously waited with the rest of the families.

After the surgery, they called us back to see her and she had just waken up from the gas. She was hysterical and I could hear her screeches before I even entered the post-operation area. She immediately calmed down when I held her, but the RN’s wanted her to drink something and kept shoving a bottle in her face causing her to become hysterical again. They decided to let us leave right away rather than monitor her for the 1 hour post-op initially recommended-which made me feel a bit uneasy.

We took her home and she ate like she had never eaten before. The poor thing was ravenous. We were all relieved to see her playing and acting normal. She went down for what I thought was a nap in the evening but she ended up sleeping 14 hours solid. I'm so compulsive that I had to check on her several times throughout the night. This morning Zanie Janie woke up with Angelina Jolie lips! The Zany Family can breath a sigh of relief now that this whole ordeal is over!

Zany thought of the day: It’s unfortunate, but sometimes it seems that it takes something traumatic to slow us down enough to think about what we really appreciate in life. I know going through this whole process with Zany Janie made me think a lot about how fortunate I am to have two healthy babies and how much I appreciate everything about them.