One Year Ago Today

One year ago today I was preparing to spend the night sleeping in an uncomfortable recliner, praying that Alison would be able to settle down and get some sleep without being held. She had just had surgery to place a VP-shunt that morning.

It had been an exhausting day. The surgery was scheduled for 7:00, the first surgery of the day, and we had to have Alison at the hospital (which was half an hour away from our house) at an insanely early time.....4:30, if I recall correctly. I guess they thought it was going to take 2 1/2 hours to put her in a gown and weigh her. She was taken back for surgery at 7:15 and was in recovery at 8:15. We were able to see her at 8:30. If only we had known we would still be there, in recovery, at 8:30 that night. Not only was the hospital not exactly equipped to handle a 7 month old baby (it took them a good hour to locate a crib.....the next morning they delivered her a breakfast of cream of wheat, a muffin, orange juice and coffee....she had barely started eating solids by that point), they didn't have enough beds in Neurosurgical ICU to accomodate the patients that needed them, especially not one that needed a private room. So we spent the day in recovery.

It really wasn't awful. It just wasn't real comfortable. They eventually moved us down in the one spot that had a TV. (I would find out later that the cable in recovery was better than the cable in the actual room.) The nurses were very nice. They all felt really badly that we were stuck there. Alison had a 2 inch incision behind her right ear and another one, which was about an inch long, in her stomach (the shunt a valve that sits under the skin behind her ear, from there a length of tubing goes through the skull and into the ventricle and another lenght of tubing goes from the valve down her neck, over her collarbone, down her chest and into her stomach cavity). She also had her IV on the left side of her head. I guess it goes without saying that she was in a bit of pain and quite uncomfortable. When we got her into a comfortable position, we tried to keep her that way as long as possible. Unfortunately, she was not comfortable lying in her crib. So she was held for most of the day. We took turns going to eat so that one of us was with her at all time. It made things easier for the nurses, though they would have loved nothing more than to take care of her for us.

I suppose it also goes without saying that there was quite a bit of crying going on that day. When you're 7 months old and have just had your head and your stomach cut open and a whole drilled in your skull, it's a pretty reasonable response. We were trying to control her pain with Tylenol and Motrin because her doctor wanted to avoid morphine if at all possible (and it ended up being possible). Most of the other patients and their families were pretty understanding. We did get a few dirty looks from a couple people. I don't know what they expected us to do. At one point, after we had been waiting for about 10 hours, another patient, who had been wating about 2 hours and whose family has been the ones giving us dirty looks when Alison cried, complained about his wait and asked how much longer it was going to be before he got moved. The nurse told him she didn't know "but that little baby over there has been waiting for a room since before I came to work this morning." After that he never said a word about waiting for a room.

We finally got moved to our room. Kevin and my parents went home and Alison and I settled in for the night. As luck would have it, she never did really settle down to sleep in the crib. I ended up laying her on my chest and we both slept in the uncomortable recliner. (I had seriously considered climbing into the crib with her, but wasn't entirely certain it would hold both of us.) You can imagine how thrilled I was when the doctor told us she could come home the next afternoon. I was not relishing the idea of spending another night in that chair.

So here we are a year later. Alison is doing great. While we are always on the lookout for shunt failure, it's no longer the first thing that comes to mind if she starts getting crabby, or is more tired than usual for a day or two. So far, she seems to have fallen into the 1/3 of shunt patients who get their shunt and never have a problem with it. We hope it stays that way.