A few weeks ago, I mentioned that Mark got some allergy testing done by the ear, nose and throat doctor who works downstairs from him. I nagged him to have his nose looked at, too, since I know deviated septums run in his family. So Dr. Pearson had a gander and was like, "WHOA....you need surgery." Yay.
Mark has sent Dr. Pearson so much business over the years with referrals though that he offered to do the procedure for basically an 80% discount. So of course we decided to go through with it. (And it's a good thing we got it done when we did, because his work abruptly decided to drop his health insurance by the end of this month.)
He was scheduled to come to the hospital at 11:15 am last Thursday. For some lovely reason, the universe was determined to give me a crappy time. The day before, Mark decided to try to fix our two humidifiers. They were both working, but Madelyn's made a lot of noise that it shouldn't and ours only worked about half of the time unless you blew on the fan to get it started. He was able to fix Madelyn's, but ended up breaking ours. One of the #1 things for his post-op care was to sleep with a humidifier...of course!! So he has had to use Madelyn's Hello Kitty one, because we cannot afford to buy a new one yet, and in the meantime poor Madelyn has had to go without, even though she (and now Luke) has had a cold.
THEN, that same night, I sent Madelyn in to take a shower and she sat down to get undressed. She put everything in a pile and stood up and got in the shower. I came in to grab a washcloth for Luke, who was bathing in the other bathroom, and saw her glasses poking out at a weird angle under her pile of the clothes on the floor. She had stepped right on them without realizing it.
Nooooooooo!!!!!
I tried to gently bend the frames back (the lenses were still okay) and then the whole thing just snapped in half. These were $200 glasses, people. She has a backup pair but they aren't the same prism strength and they're a little too narrow and make her head hurt after a while.
That night before bed, I prayed REALLLLY HARD that everything would at least go smoothly the next day, because I didn't know if I could handle it otherwise.
Well, come the next morning, I had to rush to get Madelyn and I dressed so that I could take her to the eye doctor to pick out new glasses before school. As she was getting ready, Luke came into the bathroom and announced that he needed to "choke" (throw up) so I set a stool for him at the sink, but then he said he needed to go potty, and so I had to hold a bucket under his chin while he dry heaved and pooped! I was like, Are. You. KIDDING ME, UNIVERSE. Thankfully it was not diarrhea, I have no idea why he needed to dry heave, but nothing ever came of it--he felt fine after that with no further problems.
So I raced Madelyn over to the optometrist--she picked out a new pair of glasses and they gave us credit for new lenses (since we'd just had new ones made a couple of months before), but the frames were still $150!!! Did I mention that we were broke already from paying the surgical fee?? I literally was sure the check was going to bounce before I remembered that we had $100 in a different bank I could transfer......but still we were flat broke and had another 9 days till payday. (Payday is tomorrow. It has been a long week.)
Anyway, I got Madelyn to school 10 minutes late and then had to go back and get Luke to take him to preschool (I might have been crying in the car after I dropped him off) and then had to get Mark ready to go to the hospital.
We got there at 11:15 am and went back to his room in same day surgery, and then I had to go back and pick Luke back up from preschool. In the meantime, they did all the pre-op stuff and when we came back, he was just waiting to go.
My camera battery was unceremoniously dead (of course) and so all I've got are hazy cell phone pictures.
He didn't end up going into surgery until 1:00 pm, so we had almost an hour to hang out.
I have never seen Luke wash his hands so many times. All because of the foot-operated faucet. Coolest thing EVER if you're four.
Off he goes! The surgery itself was only going to take about 45 minutes. Luke and I went down to the cafeteria for some lunch (where he threw a huge hissy fit until I figured out he wanted a cup full of ice). We saw Mark's boss down there and he said it had been an awful week to have him gone because they'd been slammed with a ton of RSV cases and had been crazy busy. (Mark did not feel too bad about this.)
Here's the procedures he was having done:
Mark was probably born with a deviated septum, but when he was a teenager, he was doing a front flip on a trampoline and landed with his knee slamming into his nose, which broke it (he thinks, his folks never took him to the doctor) and made it worse. He could never breathe from the left side of his nose very well, and his right side was too open, so his body would swell the tissues up on that side to compensate. If your nasal cavity is too big, it dries out and causes nose bleeds and other problems.
He also had to have his turbinates cut back, because they were further blocking his air flow. So fun.
We came back upstairs and Mark got wheeled back into his room a few minutes later. The anesthesiologist said he had to give him extra sedation because he was fighting the breathing tube they were trying to shove down his throat. ("You may be a little sore and hoarse...")
The surgeon said that his septum was a doozy and was shaped almost like an "S". He had to use a mallet and chisel to break it and then reset it, and had to put an extra suture at the tip of his nose to tug it straight. Ow.
The nurses all said that he was the nicest, politest person ever to come out of anesthesia. He seemed calm and almost cheerful to me, considering what he'd just been through.
We just hung out while he became more alert, and eventually his gauze soaked through with blood and a nurse came in to change it and instruct us how to do it at home. Then she basically said that we could go as soon as he could get up and move around! I think it was only about a couple of hours out of surgery that they released us.
Mark's good buddy Jake Malie, who works in same day surgery, happened to see that we were there and stopped in for a few minutes. It was nice to see him. He used to work at the clinic with Mark.
Luke was really well behaved the whole time and was perfectly happy just munching on ice chips, obsessively washing his hands, and watching Disney Jr. (Cinderella came on, which was like the first good thing that had happened all day for me.)
We had to go get Mark's prescriptions filled at Smith's right away. They couldn't call them in because one of them was a narcotic (Percoset) and so he had to sit in the car for half an hour and wait for me. He was in a lot of pain by the time we got home, and starving and weak because he hadn't been able to eat since 9:00 pm the night before and it was almost 5:00 pm.
I dropped the boys off at home, got them situated and Mark fed and drugged and then picked up Madelyn at my friend's house (thank you Jenny!) where she had gone after school.
This is basically how we spent the next five days. Mark slept on the recliner in a drugged stupor, and I tried to keep everybody fed and alive. We had to start a log for all the medicines Mark was taking because it was hard to keep track of them. I also had to play nurse and help him change his gauze and swab the dried blood off the inside/outside of his nose with a hydrogen peroxide solution. So romantic!! His upper teeth really hurt and he could only breathe out of his mouth the whole time, which made them even more sensitive. He even cut himself two straws to stick in the corners of his mouth to breathe out of to keep the air off his teeth.
When he got bored of sleeping, he was back at it with the video games, although he couldn't quite keep up the stamina he was used to. But that was a sign that he was feeling better.
After a VERY long weekend, I took him back to the doctor on Monday morning to have the splints taken out of his nose. They were these big silicone things that were shoved clear the heck up there. Everyone said he'd feel much better after they were out, and he did. Then all the lovely dried up Surgicel and coagulated blood had to start getting flushed out. Today is the first day in a week that everything is finally coming out clear.
His nose is straighter, inside and out, but he still can't breathe out of it yet. He got cut up so much inside that it is still swollen. But that should all subside in the next week. He tried sleeping in our bed for a couple of nights but can breathe better on the recliner. His face looks like it's back to normal (he had taken daily self portraits during the ordeal but didn't want me to post them) and I can't wait for him to feel what it's like to breathe like a normal person! He had a nasty taste in his mouth for the past couple of days--he could never smell or taste blood before but now he can, so it was sort of a shock to have all that gunk constantly draining out.
He returned to work on Tuesday and worked for two full, busy days, including night clinic last night. He still tires easily and got a bad headache yesterday from overexertion. But he's got today and the rest of the weekend off, so hopefully he'll feel great next week. Thank you to everyone who has been checking up on us during this--we are all just glad that it's over!!
