Surgery…Again!
The day after I was told she would need more surgery, Kayda ended up in the hospital with another cold and pneumonia. So surgery was postponed a couple of weeks. In the mean time she wore her brace 24 hrs a day. Surgery this time, was much simpler and only took an hour and a half. I had some time of panic though as the surgeon didn’t come out to talk to me. My panic grew as it got longer and longer past the 1 ½ mark. I finally went up to the nurse outside the OR and asked about Kayda only to find that she was already in the recovery room. The surgeon hadn’t been able to find me. I still don’t know what happened as I’d been in the OR waiting room the entire time except for a short bathroom break. And, even then, a friend was there and she never saw the surgeon.
Even though the surgery itself wasn’t as bad as the first one, it still caused big problems for Kayda. Once again, every tiny noise caused her to go into horrible spasms. This time we hadn’t gotten a private room (they cost extra and for some reason the social worker didn’t think it was necessary this time) and she was in a large open room where all the babies were put. So, needless to say there was quite a bit of noise. My poor girl. She also had all the same problems of not being able to keep food down for days and days.
A few days after surgery when the surgeon came to examine her I asked him about how long she’d be in casts this time. As the planned time to take them off came right around when we’d planned holidays I asked him if she could have them on a couple of weeks longer. He looked at me, thought for a minute, and then said “why don’t we leave them on for 3 months?” Three months!!!!!! This was May, that meant she would be in casts ALL summer! He said he wanted to make sure that her hip stayed in place this time. This time her legs were spread wider apart and her left leg was angled in. But…we soon found out that we couldn’t fit through many doors. I spoke to the Orthopedic resident about it and he said “ we tried different positions for her leg while she was on the operating table and this was the position it was most stable in.” In other words; “who cares if she can’t go through doors, her hip is stable anyways”. I spent a lot of time muttering that summer about Doctors who put children in casts like that should be the ones who have to get them through doors and take them on outings.
One thing that was better this time though, was that we had the seating clinic team come right to our house to adapt Kayda’s wheelchair. They took one look at her old chair and said “why can’t we use that?” That meant no ugly borrowed adult chair with a reclining back. They just added a platform to her old chair and adjusted the back to the angle the surgeon wanted her kept at. We did have a little problem when we measured all our doors and told the technician the maximum width for the platform and he then came back hours later with a platform that was 2 inches too wide!!!! Life is never simple is it?
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