Josiah's first surgery

We made it through Josiah's first surgery. This lip and nose repair is weak sauce compared to the palate one coming up, but it is really huge. All I have seen are the before and after pictures. The right after pictures are hard to find. I naively had this image in my mind that he would come out like one of those after pictures. Hello! This is surgery, Teresa! Boy was this hard!

We left about two hours before we needed to be there to get there on time. We waited a long time before they called us. At least it seemed like a really long time because he hadn't eaten since 3am! The surgery was at 10am, but they didn't really start until 11:15am. There was a family a head of us that bumped us out of our earlier time slot. They had a boy named Cole who was two months old. He was getting his lip repair done, too. We finally hand them our baby and have a long lunch. During this waiting time we handed in our prescription, read some magazines, and ate lunch. We then headed back to the waiting room. Dr. Reinisch comes out and tells us that his other nostril is now larger than the one he worked on, so he will need to have another surgery to correct that. He also has this line on his upper lip that he will correct with the other nostril. We may do this in a couple of months or during his palate surgery. Here we are talking about the next surgeries when we've just barely survived the first one.

We walk in to the recovery room and Josiah is lying on his little bed. He was intubated, so his breathing is pretty loud. They were concerned about his oxygen levels and his noisy breathing because of his sleep apnea. They asked me if I wanted to hold him and of course I did. So I sat down and they placed him in my arms. I couldn't hold back the tears. I felt like the joy that was "stolen" from me at his birth had been given back to me. It was a beautiful moment. I couldn't believe that they had done so much in two hours! He now has complete lips! I fully expected him to have a set of lips when he was born and when he didn't it was very hard. Looking at him in my arms was like looking at him for the first time. Even though I knew it wasn't our first meeting it felt like they had given me a second chance to have that special moment. It's hard to explain, so I'm sorry if I'm not making any sense.

Dr. Reinisch says two things I will never forget. When I tell him, "I can't believe you were able to do this in such a short amount of time." He said, "It was nice to have one to warm up on." He kind of chuckled when he said this. The second thing he said was: "His nose area is bruised because I lifted the skin up off of that area." AAAH! That was one part of the surgery I didn't need to know about.

The doctors were concerned because he was taking a long time to wake up. He finally woke up about an hour and a half later. He cried and cried. His oxygen level went up and his breathing sounded much better. They placed us in the PICU anyhow. It was pretty scary because we had been in one at CHLA and stayed for four weeks! Both of us were able to stay with him there. It was a really rough night. Every time he was awake he was crying, so all we could do was put him back to sleep. Thankfully we were able to come home this morning.

His feedings have been up and down. I almost lost it around 2:30pm today. It's so hard to know what to do. He is hungry, so I try to feed him. But, then he screams bloody murder and I think I'm hurting him. It was so frustrating that I actually thought "What have I done? Can we go back? I just want my baby back. I want my happy Josiah back." Ridiculous, but I was ready to throw in the towel. I think the hardest part for me is that I didn't think recovery would be this hard. I know that we just need to get through this, but I need God's strength. The last two feedings have been better, so thank you for everyone who is praying for us. We'll see how his first time at home goes.