We all sat in the waiting room for the longest two hours of my life it seemed. Finally, the doc came by and said he was in recovery. Billy and I rushed back to see him. I sat rubbing his foot and playing toesies with his feet trying to lull him out of the anesthesia.. after a few moments he came around and saw us and fell back asleep. My mom came in and sat with him while we ran home to grab a shower and new clothes. I was feeling quite wretched at this point having not been home since we left for the pediatrician the prior morning.
They got him back in his room and we all slept that night. Well, I wouldn't say slept.. we were there.. with eyes closed from exhaustion..but sleep wouldn't be how I could describe it. The next morning the doctor came in to fill us in more thoroughly. It turns out it was exactly his appendix and it had not only ruptured but had set up gangreen!!! He explained that there was quite a bit to remove but that he successfully got it all out and he should be brand new in no time. We were looking at maybe a 5-7 day stay. I can't believe how horrible my baby must have felt with all that in him. He was so tough and strong.
Those 5-7 days turned into two weeks. His incision kept leaking quite a bit and he was so dehydrated from going without food or drink for the first few days.. his output of urine wasn't enough to satisfy the docs AND he wasn't holding anything down that well.. so when you can't keep food down you can't "go to the bathroom" either.. and all those things had to be in line.
If you have done the math on the days he was in vs. the dates of everything, you will have noticed that my surgery came during the time he was in the hospital. We had hoped he could go home the Monday before my surgery, which would have been the 25th, but we quickly realized that that wasn't going to happen.
At some point during my consultations and the immense amount of paperwork I was handed, I somehow missed or misunderstood the amount of money I was due to pay before surgery. I was TOLD I would need to have 500 dollars with me at pre admit on the 25th. About a week before surgery I had received a letter stating that my portion would be 1500 for the ins copay. Freaking out a little. Another mishap was that the doctors office failed to tell me that THEIR Fee would be 2000 dollars due before surgery.. so now I am frantic, sitting beside my sick child wondering if this is all a sign or not. How could we scramble together 3500 bucks in 48 hours?!? I guess the sign this was meant to be was that we did it. Billy and I were able to come up with all but 700 bucks of it.. and my mother, god help her, lent us the rest.
I tried at one point to reschedule the surgery as I didn't want to leave my baby and both of us be in the hospital at the same time, but was told that if I did that I would have to go through the ENTIRE approval process AGAIN. We all decided to just suck it up and do it. I wouldn't have given it a second thought if A wouldn't have been on the road to wellness.
So, Tuesday night, we all piled up in A's room and got ready to wake at the crack of dawn to drive over two blocks to the hospital I would be sitting in for three days. Five o'clock came we had showered and were ready ,, Billy and I left out, said our good bye's,, gave tons of kisses to keep him full till I could return, and headed out on the dawn of my New Life.
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