Tubular

So yeah, got up at 5:45 yesterday so I could take Alex over to the Surgery Center to get tubes in his ears.

He was perfectly fine (if a bit befuddled) until we actually started heading back to the prep room, and then he started looking pitiful, as if he knew what was coming. He was clingy but mostly okay in the prep room, except when the nurse had the unmitigated gall to take his temperature and blood pressure. That was just brimming over with wrongosity.

Then they gave him a dose of something in a syringe to make him sleepy, and that was hysterical. I know exactly when it hit him, because we were sitting on the bed, reading Max's Bath for the forty-seventh time, and the anesthesiologist came in to go over his part and have me sign the release forms, and he looked at Alex and said "Hey, buddy!" and Alex busted up into giggles. And then he continued to giggle randomly while I signed release forms, and giggled randomly when I went back to reading the book... When Penny had her ear surgeries, the stuff made her drowsy and dopey, but Alex, I swear, was acting high.

("Well, I can see he's already had his medicine," the anesthesiologist said, looking amused. "He's acting a little..." "Yeah," I agreed, "he's reminding me of a guy I dated in college." Which startled the anesthesiologist into a snort.)

He started crying when the nurse took him away for the surgery, and then I sat in the corner and played solitaire on my phone for twenty minutes or so until the doctor came in to tell me that it was done and they were just waiting for Alex to wake up. His middle ear had apparently been full of gunk and goo, so the doctor had suctioned it out and then washed it with an antiseptic solution to reduce the chance of infection, and he increased the number of times per day he wanted us to put the post-op antibiotic drops in Alex's ears. Apparently the poor kid has the same problem I do, where his sinuses fill up his ears before they get to the nasal cavity, and then the ears never do drain completely.

The good news is that with the tubes aiding proper drainage, Alex should see an immediate improvement in his hearing, which means over the next month or so, his speech clarity and vocabulary (understood and spoken) should improve dramatically.

A few minutes later, they brought him to me. I'd known (and been warned again) that kids usually woke up from anesthesia with some disorientation and in bad moods. Penny had cried inconsolably for an hour or more after her surgeries. Alex... was violent. He was not sad, he was angry. He twisted and flailed, threw anything he could pick up, slapped and punched and kicked. And when he was coherent, he screamed for "Mama! Mama!" even when I was holding him.

Eventually, the nurses decided that he wasn't going to calm down as long as he was in the surgery center, and they let me take him home. He switched from angry to merely sad as soon as we started moving, and even stopped crying for a few minutes in the car. When we got home, he realized he was thirsty and sucked down the apple juice he'd scorned at the hospital and another cup of milk, then consented to eat a banana and a little yogurt for breakfast.

He was still randomly bursting into sobs, though, so as soon as he was done eating, I took him up to his crib and tucked him in. This seemed to agree with him -- I heard occasional sobby breaths for half an hour or so, and then it all evened out into sleep, and he slept straight through until 11:30. Despite the maid service coming and making a bunch of noise.

When he woke up, he was cheerful and bouncy and happy. He watched Sesame Street and looked at books and went outside to "draw" on the driveway with chalk, and seemed to take great delight in talking and demanding that I tell him the names for things.

So hopefully his speech will improve, and the ear infections will go away (or at least appear on a normal, once or twice a year schedule instead of every three weeks). Yay, tubes!