Jack's surgery aftermath......

The days that followed Jack’s surgery was not fun in the least. We knew that the recovery was going to be a hard road but both Mike and I were pretty surprised that is would be this difficult. Jack had been sick for a while and we had been giving him medicine since the middle part of January. He normally takes Ibuprofen or Tylenol with no problems, but after surgery his tune changed. Starting from right after surgery, getting Jack to take any medicine was a struggle that I was not winning. I knew that if he took the medicine he would feel better but how do you communicate that to a stubborn 2 year old. Jack did most of the recovery from surgery without much pain medicine at all. I could occasionally slip a med into whatever beverage he was sipping on through the day but the little smarty got wise to my plan. He would start watching me pour the juice and if it was out of his sight at ALL, he wouldn’t drink it. Really?!!? We tried every idea we could think of trying to force him to take his medicine. We pinned him down, shoved the syringe in his mouth, and then proceeded to get sprayed with spit and medicine as he fought so hard to not swallow. Most of the time I ended up washing the medicine off my face and then consoling him for the trauma he just went through. We did this for the first week, and then Jack spiked a fever of 104. We called the surgeon’s office and they told us to bring him into the Emergency Dept. We brought the pathetic little guy in and they fixed him up. They gave him IV fluids, pain medicine via the IV, Tylenol suppositories, and some steroids to decrease the inflammation in his throat. After a few hours there, they sent us home to carry on the battle. Jack eventually did get better but it took almost 2 full weeks. That was longer than I anticipated, but worth it in the end. I’m sure there will be a time that the trauma of the recovery will fade (for him and I) and that the only thing I will remember is that it brought better breathing to Jack. I’m sure that will be a year or more down the road, though…