The four procedures

Grommets, ABR, CT scan and eye pressure test were the four tests to be done on my boy today.

My wife and I arrived shortly after 7:00am to the hospital. Raphael had already been given some preventative ventolin and the anaesthetis arrived shortly afterwards to give him some a drying medicine (to help with his secretions during the operation) and some other stuff. Actually with the number of syringe fulls of drugs that the anaesthetist injected into his line, I was half expecting Raphael to bulge a bit.

His fluid line was still in and the nurse came and asked us to put him in his baby hospital gown so we stripped his clothes of but of course his singlet could not be removed from the line Annie and I had a good chuckle about all of the possible ways that we could potentially get his singlet of him but eventually resigned ourselves to the fact that he would go into surgery with his grotty singlet dangling from the IV tube

Annie and I prayed that we would see his cheeky smile again.

Finally we brought him to the day surgery area where he was going to start his procedures with the insertion of grommets. We even ran into his normal Audiologist who had postponed her travel just so she could perform the ABR test on him.

After a short wait, I was asked to put on a surgical gown and hat in order to bring Raphael into the theatre. After several embarrassing attempts to correctly put on the surgical gown the nurse said that'll do. I can only assume that she would have a chuckle at my expense later, she did a good job at holding a straight face while I was fighting with it. In hindsight it really wasn't that hard to do. I can only assume that my mind was somewhere else completely, preventing me from completing even this simple task.

After wheeling him into the theatre and putting him on the operating table the surgeon advised me that the ophthalmologist would arrive in fifteen minutes to perform the eye pressure test. After that they ushered me out of the theatre and back to the waiting room.

We knew the procedures would probably take over 2 hours (if everything went well). After about 3 hours we were told that Raphael was awake and we went to see him in recovery. He was in a little pain and his eyes and lips were swollen from fluid (not an allergic reaction). He was in much better shape than last time he had a GA. We are grateful for the special preparation that the anaesthetist organised for him.

That afternoon he was hooked up to an oxygen saturation monitoring machine and while he was having an afternoon sleep he had two instances when he could not breath properly and had to be turned onto his side to get him breathing again properly. He had been given some codeine to help with his pain and since his episodes I heard a rumour that opioids like codeine can cause resperation difficulties in babies that are already at risk. This made me question why he was given codeine. I was told that the issue was that he had already had paracetamol, and aspirin was a bigger risk after surgery. There was also mitigation for giving him codeine in that he was given the minimum dose and also that there was a nurse constantly in the room monitoring the oxygen saturations of the kids in the room. It all turned out ok and to put this in context he has previously demonstrated that he can desaturate under normal circumstances when he is sleeping on his back so it may have had nothing to do with the opioid anyway.

Later that evening he even gave a smile although he wasn't quite back to his usual self yet.