Day of surgery

On Monday surgery wasn't scheduled until 3:00 so it was a long wait until then. By then Cordelia was getting sick of her hospital room so we spent more time in the family room that day. After her nap and a bottle I decided to take her in the family room one more time because it would be awhile before she could play again. We were in there for about five minutes when the nurse came in and told us it was time. Once again, Fred was not in the room. He was down on second floor trying to get some paperwork done. We stopped there on our way to pre-op to get him. I think the wait in pre-op felt longer than the wait during surgery. I just wanted it to be all over with and that made it feel longer. Before surgery we had to talk to the surgeon, anesthesiologists, and nurses. Then the anesthesiologist came back to give Cordelia a "cocktail" which would relax her as they took her away from us and into surgery. It seriously took 30 seconds for the cocktail to work. Her poor little head started bobbing and she was smiling big and giggling. If I wouldn't have been laughing so hard I would have been crying as they took her away. I intended to have a big cry in the waiting room, but we were surprised to see how small and packed the waiting room was. Every other waiting room we had seen was big with not many people in it. So my crying would have to wait because I just can't cry with so many people around. We were also surprised by another modern convenience in the waiting room. A number was assigned to each child in surgery and on a big computer screen, each parent could keep track of where their child was at in the surgery. They updated the information when surgery started, when it was complete, and when the child was in the recovery room. They also made a couple of phone calls to the waiting room to keep us updated. The surgery took about two hours to complete. The time went fast because we kept our minds busy. I had a Games Magazine that I bought a couple of weeks earlier and still hadn't started. (I don't know why I thought I would have time to sit down and play games. Anyway, it came in handy that day.) Fred even helped me with some of the puzzles. I didn't know he was so good at crosswords until then. Since Cordelia's surgery was late in the afternoon, by the time the surgeon came in the waiting room we were the last ones there. He said everything went great and we would be going back up to third floor soon. There was the possibility of her going to ICU after surgery, but they were able to take the breathing tube out thus skipping out on ICU. This was a huge relief for me. We had a tour of ICU the day before and I was having a hard time there. It was almost too much to handle and it wasn't even my child hooked up to all those machines. It was really nice to be back in our private room. The rest of the day Cordelia mostly slept. When she did open her eyes, it wasn't for long. She had so many tubes and monitors attached to her. She had a tube down her nose that went into her tummy, two IVs (one from previously in her hand that wasn't hooked up to anything and one in her foot that was giving her fluids), a chest tube, an epidural, and a pulse oximeter on her toe that kept track or her breathing and heart rate. That night we spent the night at the hospital.