Better late than never?

Death to the Goiter!

Finn underwent his second and final surgery at Phoenix Children's. His surgery was scheduled for 11 am with a check in time of 9 am and he would not be allowed to eat or drink after midnight preceding the day. I knew this was going to be tough - how do you explain to a 15 month old that he cannot have his morning "ba ba" or any thing to eat because he might asphyxiate during surgery? And seeing as he gets up at 6 am I knew I'd have 5 hours of one sad Finn. All of this was before the hospital called me the day before to inform us that Finn's surgery had been pushed back to 2 pm and that we should check in at noon. I asked the nurse how a 15 month old was supposed to cope without food for 8 hours she told me I could wake him up in the middle of the night and feed him as long as we were completely done by 3 am. Super, says I.

I decided to try and keep him up late and made sure he ate and drank as much as possible. I also woke him up at 2 am and brought him in my room with a DVD and a huge bottle of whole milk / half n half (I was going for calorically dense). Sweet little guy didn't know what was going on and he wasn't really in the mood to eat at 2 am but we did our best and he thought the whole ordeal was kinda funny. He was still up by 6:40 am and spent the morning as I had known he would crying on the kitchen floor in front of the pantry - it was really too pathetically sad for words. The silver lining was that his lack of sleep had him down for a nap by 9 and he was still asleep as we shoved him into the car and headed down to the hospital. He had fun in pre-op running around playing with a giant pit of toys. They gave him some extremely girly PJs and even better some Versed! The Versed was given to him orally and within 5 minutes Finn was completely and utterly stoned. He was glassy eyed, drooling, and smiling away. It took 2 minutes for him to register the nurse waving at him and to wave back. Can we get some of that for home?

The surgery itself was over 3 agonizing hours and again the worst part was handing my baby off to some nurse and watching him carried off down some hallway. I'm tearing up just typing that - wow. The procedure went very well and the micro surgeon came out and told us that he had removed a mass the size of a golf ball from Finn's neck and that it had been entwined with the nerve that gives him feeling to his earlobe, the nerve that allows him to raise and lower his shoulder, as well as his jugular vein. The micro surgeon likened it to cancer removal, but said that Finn did very well and that there should be no lasting damage.

They let Mike and I go back into recovery and I just rocked him and held him for an hour while he tried to shake off the anesthesia. Mike and I were both shocked by the size of the incision - but it was really tight and looked really good. Now I'm just telling myself that it will be a really sexy Indiana Jonesish jawline scar that the ladies will love.

Finn and I spent that night in the hospital and were able to return home the following day. His 1 and 6 week post surgical exams went well and (knock on wood) this is behind us.

Now if only those hospital bills were behind us.......sigh.......