Une Envie de Sel

This part of the story isn't pretty, but it is real, and it is part of what it means to be the parent of a child adopted with medical needs.

I was so overwrought over this surgery (we had some problems during the last big surgery that frightened me pretty badly) that I didn't intend to take, or post, pictures during this one. But others in the room had other ideas, and in the end it feels good to have survived this as a family. Here she is goofing around with her hat on the way into the surgery room.

This is the worst part, as she is waking up from anesthesia, still in the recovery room.

It's a temporary relief to be allowed downstairs to a hospital room, where you can spread out and have some space, and when you know the recovery room is behind you.

 True to form, Q was ready to drink juice from a straw right away. This is unusual for this kind of surgery - many children have a great deal of difficulty figuring out how to swallow afterward, and some spend days in the hospital before they are even able to take liquid nourishment on their own.

But this is just the very beginning of a very long, scary and sleepless 24 hours.

Here she is resting in daddy's arms in the hospital room, still under the influence of the anesthesia. As day wears into night in the hospital, things get a lot worse. The night is very difficult, and filled with repeated and escalating screaming fits, night terrors and drug-induced hysteria on various levels. When she does sleep, it is very nearly as harrowing, because we are left staring at the oxygen monitors and her breathing becomes depressed and her oxygen goes steadily lower. Occasionally we have to wake her and force her to take a deep breath, which inevitably leads to another harrowing screaming fit.

 Eventually, however many years it seems to take, it is morning, and in the morning she was eating smoked salmon and pats of butter, drinking juice and milk, and feeling like a new person. We were released by 8 and on our way home. Here she is, thrilled to be back on her own couch, opening presents that came for her in the mail...

 ...this one all the way from France.

 Many thanks, Violette!

One thing that we have frequently forgotten ourselves during this process (being as we were so worried about the internal part of the surgery and its aftermath) is that she was also scheduled for a tip rhinoplasty. It was kind of an afterthought on the part of our surgeon, since it was not urgent, but she felt like it could be done along with the p-flap surgery in order to save us an extra trip to the OR. So it was that we were all a little surprised to recall that she was coming out of surgery with a "new nose". She herself finds this part kind of funny, except that she hates being called pretty, and all the nurses kept doing exactly that in the recovery room. It is, I must say, a lovely nose - even if it was not our main concern. We have a superb plastic surgeon, one of the best, and for this we feel extremely fortunate.

Today, Q is feeling thrilled to be sprung from the hospital and back in her own environs. According to the nurses, she will feel worse before she feels better (swelling near the spinal column will make her feel pretty rotten over the next couple of days). But she's home and so are we, and all of us feel so very relieved to have come through this surgery to see the light of day.

(Thanks to Susan and Mike for the in-hospital photos)