If Your Child Is In Surgery, You Will Forget Your Keys

Today was the big day for Kenzie as her arthrogram was scheduled to take place. We were supposed to show up at the Rocky Mountain Hospital for Children at Presbyterian/St. Luke's Hospital at 9:15 to check in. Since Sarah is irritated by late patients every damn day, we were to PSL by 8:45. You might call us punctual. We wandered into the hospital and found the Pediatric Surgery wing. It was easy to distinguish as it was the only part of the building that had any color whatsoever. It is a brand new $130M facility on the edge of the existing hospital. It was gorgeous. We check in at the front desk, wait for a little bit before we are ushered back to her pre-op room. We waited there until the doctor, her PA, and the anesthesiologist had finished their first case of the day and were ready to work on Kenzie. As we waited, Linda, Grandma, Randy, and my mom all showed up to offer their moral support. A little after 11:00, they finally took Mackenzie to the operating room and we migrated out to meet our family in the waiting area.

About a half an hour into our waiting (maybe not even that long), the doctor came out to show us an arthrogram. They had started the procedure how they normally do - they put her under, give her an IV, inject the dye into her healthy hip socket, then inject dye into her displaced hip socket. The dye allows the imaging process to clearly show the conditions of the still-developing bones. When they were able to get a better picture of her condition, they had some good news to share with us. She brought an image out for us to see that her left hip was, in fact, not dislocated. But it was not developing correctly and was in danger of coming out as she grew. I like to think of her hip socket as a trailer hitch, with the hip socket being the hitch and the femur being the ball. Right now, her hip has not moved the lever to a locked position. We need it to be locked so that she doesn't lose her trailer going 80 down I-70. Or something like that.

The result of our little chat was that she was not going to need to be in a cast. The doctor said that the goal of putting her in the cast for that first month was to get her leg to exactly where she was now. Instead of doing a cast for a month, instead she is going to be in a brace. The brace will hold her in the same position as the cast, it is just less work for us and less rigidity for her. She can still move her legs below the knees, where the cast would completely have restricted movement below the waist. We are still scheduled to come back in four weeks to do a second arthrogram to check the progress. Hopefully, the brace will allow for better hip development and we can do another month of the brace followed by a third arthrogram and a third month of the brace. If there is not an improvement with the brace this month, she will get casted next time for a month, then a third arthrogram and another month of casting. Regardless of what happens, we are probably looking at three months of the brace and/or casting and four arthrograms. We are not out of the woods yet, but things are definitely looking better now than they were even 24 hours ago.

I will admit that the time when they first took Kenzie away from us to go to the operating room was tough. We are so used to being the ones who are ultimately responsible for her health and safety that is was completely foreign to rely on anyone else for an unknown length of time. Once she was in her procedure, Sarah and I commandeered an empty pre-op room so that she could pump. When we were in there, there was a beeping noise coming from the hallway. In my naivety, I just ignored it. Sarah informed me it was a code. Talk about having your stomach drop - my daughter is currently going under general anesthesia and we are hearing a code. Stressful.

A few of Sarah's coworkers stopped by to see how we were doing and to drop off a big bag of diapers and a stuffed sheep. Apparently they don't frequent that side of PSL, because they were just as lost as we were!

When she came out of the procedure, she was awake before we could even get to the recovery room. She was not a happy camper. We tried getting her some breast milk, some Pedialite, a binky, her thumb. She wasn't taking anything. Once Sarah finally got her calmed down, I went downstairs to give our family an update and to move some stuff to the car. Since it was going to be a while before she was discharged, Linda, Grandma, and Randy said they were going to leave. My mom waited around long enough for me to get back from dropping stuff off at the car and moving it over to a closer parking spot. Randy offered to take me and my two bags over to our car since we were parked in Africa. He dropped me off, I climbed the stairs to our car. As I walked to the tailgate, I realized that I had left my keys in the diaper bag, which was sitting next to my mom on the other side of the hospital. Randy was already gone, so I lugged the bags I was carrying back to where my mom was sitting, grabbed my keys, and hiked back to the car. Like I said before, if your child is just out of surgery, you WILL forget your keys. After a quick move of the car, we were just waiting on Kenzie's discharge. We were out of there by 2:30 or so. The rest of the day was spent lounging at our house trying to get used to this new contraption on our daughter. The brace can only be removed for diaper changes and baths. Naturally, this afternoon, Kenzie decided that she was going to unleash a furious chain of bowel movements. We are already quite proficient at getting the brace on and off. Way to be a good teacher, Kenzie.

Lastly, I wanted to thank all of our friends and family for their incredible support as we embarked on this latest adventure in parenting. The outpouring of prayers and thoughts and well wishes the last week or so has been astounding. We truly appreciate having you all in our lives. It is times like this that remind us why we associate ourselves with you all. If you were jerks, we would have kicked you to the curb years ago!!

I'm sure there will be more information coming from us as this adventure continues. It is already a huge adjustment to our lives, but we try to remind ourselves that we are doing this to make her quality of life better.

Thanks again.

Mike (and Sarah)