Frankenstein's Monster

That is what S3 will be for Halloween! The Frankenstein Monster, well, that's what he will look like anyway. He is scheduled for surgery on Wednesday, October 18th. So he will be in the hospital at least through the 23rd.

The neurosurgeon that we saw today agreed with the other doctor that S3 should have surgery as he has a rather substantial case of metopic synostosis. Getting the CAT scan this morning was the worst because they had to sedate S3 but they couldn't get a vein. Dave has really small veins that make it hard for people to draw blood on him, mine are huge and it's never a problem for me. But for S3 it took five different tries, once on each arm by the radiology nurse, once again on each arm by the IV technician and finally the third time on his right arm the second IV tech got it. A combination of extra small veins and lots of chubbiness made it hard. They even checked his feet to see if they could find a better vein there but no luck. Needless to say S3 screamed the whole time and was all sweaty from trying to thrash around to get away. He was also none too thrilled with all the cotton balls and band-aids and tape he was then sporting.

The rest of the visit was rather uneventful but involved lots of wait time. In fact part of that time was spent waiting for S3 to wake up. When we went to put him on the board for the CAT Scan he wouldn't let go of me so we had to give him more drugs. Once he was on the board, when the machine turned on and he started to slide back through the ring, he kept trying to look around at everything. So they stopped it and the nurse came in and gave him another drug that kept him from being able to move around. They then did the rest of the scan. As I went to pick him up he was pretty much a limp baby in my arms. We took him back to the sedation recovery room and I put him down in a crib. They hooked him up to a pulse ox monitor and slapped a pressure cuff on his leg. He looked at me and made a few noises and just when you thought he would wake up (the drugs are short acting) he fell asleep. S3 had worn himself out fighting the needles earlier, plus I had gotten him up 1 1/2 hours earlier than normal to get to the hospital on time. He slept for about an hour and when he woke up S3 looked around like, where the am I? He turned his head and saw me and promptly tried to get up. I picked him up and it was just like every other time he gets up from a nap, ready to conquer the day, only a bit hungrier since it was after 10 am and he hadn't had anything to eat yet that morning.

Anyway, we shall enjoy this next month until S3 has to have his forehead removed and reattached. Joy! That ought to make for some exciting scrapbook pages.