Infant Ear Tubes

At the ripe old age of 9 months and 2 days we took our precious baby girl into get bilateral Eustachian tubes placed. I dreaded/feared the night before the surgery. Not because of the surgery itself - we have been down that road twice before with our son, but because we are not allowed to feed the baby anything after midnight. While I do realize for "normal" 9 month olds this is not really a big deal, you have to understand that our 9 month old has never slept through the night. In fact the two nights prior to this one, she was up every hour. Yes, that is right, crying in pain EVERY hour from about 11:00 to 3:00 or 4:00. I don't know why but she does always manage to get a few hours of solid sleep in before I have to wake her up in the morning to get ready. Go figure. Anyway, back to last night....we strategized, prayed, and gave medicated aid to keep this precious child asleep.  To no avail.  She woke up at 11:00 and I fed her, then I woke her up again at midnight for another feeding, thinking this would sustain her until we needed to go.  But she was up screaming by 1:00 - we walked, rocked, watched TV, had water/apple juice and she refused to go back to sleep or even calm down until she just wore herself out around 3:30.  Then she slept until 5:15.  We got ourselves and both kids ready and headed to the hospital.  Daddy took Bubba into daycare early and was able to make it before Rissa went back. 

 

Looking cute even in her hospital gown and cap



Ya think?





Fun games while we waited for surgery

 

 What we were told would be about a 10 minute surgery was nearly an hour.  The doc came out afterward and told us that it was more complicated that they thought. Apparently she had a lot of very thick fluid in both ears.  The doc reported that she typically uses a suction level of a 3 on babies and in rare cases will use a 5.  For our little over achiever she had to use a 7.  She said she spent a lot of extra time making sure things were really cleaned out and said we would notice a huge difference even today!

Now despite constant ear infections for the past 4-5 months, Marissa is a very pleasant child and is rarely grumpy so I am hoping that the huge difference will mean guaranteed sleep for all of us (fingers crossed).

Here was our recovering baby:



She was a little fussy as she was initially coming out of anesthesia, but calmed once we got a bottle in her mouth.  She has had bouts of fussiness today but even that has been rare.  Thank God! 

 Here's hoping that we will not have to do this again....we will see if third time is a charm for the Yancy family!