In-patient

Carson is out of surgery and up on the 4th floor of Children's Hospital for the night (at least). He did really well during surgery and he now has no tonsils or adenoids and brand new tubes in his ears. His ENT said that his tonsils were very large and that he will be a new kid with them out. His other ENT surgeon came out to talk to us and show us pictures of his bronch and tell us about Carson's trachea. It turns out that Carson does have tracheal stenosis but it is minor and WON'T require surgery. He has about a 10% narrowing of his trachea caused by being intubated at birth in the NICU. This narrowing is made up of scar tissue and makes his trachea square shaped instead of nice and round (I'll definitely post pics when I get home and scan them....they are cool!). It is almost 100% responsible for all of his croup in the past 3 years. His ENT said that we don't need to do any dilation procedures to try and widen the scar tissue or (thank God) any reconstructive trachea surgeries. The bad news is that we now must just wait for him to grow out of it. Their best guess is that it will take about 5 years before Carson doesn't get croup with every upper respiratory infection. They will treat him with steroids every time he gets a cold and/or URI so that the swelling and inflammation of his trachea is kept to a minimum since it is already partially narrowed.

Now on to post-op in the room. Carson is having a anesthesia reaction. He is bright red all over his face and arms. He is extremely tachycardic (around the 130-150 resting) and hypotensive. He is also having respiratory complications along with the reaction so they put him on q2hr Albuterol in addition to his Flovent and antibiotics. Carson has only desatted 4 times and it was only down to the 81-83 range so we aren't too concerned about his respiratory status but they are doing q30min vitals on him to make sure he's stabilizing and not getting worse. They finally have him off of the Morphine and moved onto Tylenol w/ Codeine and he is tolerating it pretty well. He is very nauseous from swallowing all of the blood but they are holding off on the phenergan order for another hour to see how he does. He will be on IV fluids until discharge because he isn't having much fluid intake and they don't want him dehydrating. So far we have gotten him to eat two whole purple Popsicles and three tiny bites of vanilla pudding. He also drank 2oz of apple juice.

I'm off to go watch some more movies, ready books, and try and make my big baby feel better. Sometime today I have to squeeze in some study time because my statistics final is tomorrow morning at 10 and it is cumulative over the whole book. I'll try to update tomorrow when we get home. Pray for an uneventful night full of sleep and good sats!