Monday, April 02, 2007

April Plans

Over on From Our Blog 2 Yours at Sweet Shoppe Designs, Aggie asked what people's April plans were going to be. At that point our life was rather in flux and I didn't really have any plans at all. That changed on Saturday, and now I have the major points on the month sorted out.

You see, on Saturday we got a letter from the children's hospital giving us a date for Marcus to have his adenoids and tonsils out. He's had breathing issues from before day one when I was being given steriod shots to fast-track maturation of his lungs when it become clear he was going to be born 13 weeks prematurely.

While he was only on a respirator for about 4 hours, we was on CPAP for 6 weeks or so and on low-flow air for the better part of another month. All his prematurity issues have related around this or side-effects of this.

Many have resolved themselves or been corrected but the latest (and hopefully the last) is taking out his adenoids and tonsils. He'll have to stay in for at least 24 hours as they monitor how his breathing adjusts to having the obstruction removed as right now the pressure involved is really high and he'll have to learn to breathe at a lower pressure.

He has to be at the hospital at 7.30am on 18th April.

We had been waiting to find out the date before making Easter plans, but now we have it we're going to go down and stay with family for Easter before coming back up here and getting ourselves ready for the operation.

He has a busy week before the op, with a meeting with his Early Intervention Assessor on the Monday, an appointment with his Speech Therapist on the Tuesday and then hospital and the operation on Wednesday. (And the kid is only three!)

Then he needs to stay home for at least 10 days to recover and adjust, which takes us up to the end of the month. Since I usually use his daycare days to get some rest to recover from his home days, this is going to be hard on both of us. Dave is taking the rest of that first week off so we'll both be home on the first few days, which will be good. After that, we'll have to see how we manage.

So we've got a busy and, for me at least, slightly scary April ahead of us.

But if this does as much good as everyone hopes (Marcus sleeping properly which means Kerry and Dave sleeping properly and an improvement in Marcus' oxygen uptake and hopefully his speech as well) it will be well worth it all.

1 comment:

ThePreemie Experiment said...

Good luck with the surgery.

My daughter (former 25 weeker-now 8 years old) had hers removed when she was 6. She also stayed in overnight (worried about nutrition and too much weight loss). She surprised everyone and was eating mashed potatoes that night.

The biggest benefit, for us, was her weight gain. It's always been a struggle but after the surgery she gained 5 pounds in 6 months!

Good luck!
Stacy