Anything for C-Note

Recovery – The First 24hrs

Posted on the October 21st, 2009 under Surgery by C-Note's Dad

I expected tears. I expected grogginess. What I never expected was the level of nausea and dizziness that would render my little girl helpless.

• She threw up her medicine and was clearly in severe pain because we could not get any painkiller in her. We called the hospital 4 hours after discharge to ask for some advice. We were told to give her some flat soda to get her sugar levels up and to try again. The soda idea was a flop, but we were able to give her 1/2 dose of Tylenol that night.
• She ate 1/3 cup of kid’s yogurt about 3 hrs after surgery. Then, we gave her some Tylenol chewable Meltaways, which did not sit well with her. She threw that up too and did not want any more yogurt or medicine after that.  Luckily, we had bath towels nearby to catch the vomit and tossed them into the bathtub until we knew she was okay and one of us could break away to wash them with any soiled pajamas.
• The remaining doses of Tylenol stayed down like clockwork. We had switched to grape flavored liquid Children’s Dye Free Tylenol instead of the Meltaways and had good luck. We believe that the Tylenol with codeine administered at the hospital was making her nauseous and dizzy.
• Considering all the IV fluid they pumped in her, I would have thought she would have had to urinate more than she did. She didn’t urinate for the first time until 8 hrs after the procedure. Had she not urinated by 8 hrs, we were instructed to bring her back to the hospital.
• Her speech was slurred, and we couldn’t understand what she was saying.She remained nauseous and dizzy throughout the night. Her mother had to sit behind her, leaning against the headboard, to hold her up long enough to take her medicine. When she wasn’t fighting the medicine, she was trying to slump back onto the bed. Her head hurt very badly, and it was all we could do to persuade her to take her medicine.
• She could not walk at all. Between the codeine and the surgery, her balance was gone, leaving her feeling that her head was heavy and her legs were wobbly.
• She had the sniffles that night. The surgeon warned us to watch for spinal fluid dripping continuously from her nose, so we stayed up round the clock to watch for any increased drainage that would be a trigger to head to the hospital. During one moment in the middle of the night, we saw a puddle on the sheets that concerned us. I’ve never looked so closely at a puddle of druel in my entire life.
• She would point to the crown of her head (instead of her ear) whenever we asked her where it hurt. The only thing that made sense to us was that she had a headache that was somehow related to losing spinal fluid.It took two of us to give her the medicine: one to hold her up, the other to squirt in the Tylenol or antibiotic. To make a long night even longer, neither of the medications seemed to coincide the the timing of the other one.
• Her hearing aid wouldn’t fit because of the bandage. She couldn’t use it anyway because she couldn’t sit up by herself and it would have just whistled continuously against the pillow.

She didn’t want to watch TV, eat, sit up, or walk. It was a painful contrast to the bubbly little girl who was excited to be going to the hospital this morning. Here we were at the very day that our family had been anticipating for years and all I could think about was how much I never ever wanted to relive that day again.