Thursday 15 November 2012

The operation is over.........

It's only 3pm here right now so I expect there may be more to report before the end of the day, but I thought I would do a quick update for all those people back home waiting for news.

The main news is that the operation is over and Dr Park thinks it went well. Daniel is now asleep in his private room on the 12th floor of the hospital, and seems comfortable for the time being.

We arrived at the hospital early this morning and Daniel was very relaxed, happy and chatty. He enjoyed putting on his hospital pyjamas, and both he and Starry, the bear, had a hospital wristband. Rich and I did have to fight back tears though when Daniel told us how lucky he thought he was to have this operation!

waiting to go down to theatre

They gave him a sedative ('sleepy medicine') so he was super-relaxed and floppy when they took him back to the operating theatre. We retired to our private waiting room, and once we had got over the initial whack of emotion, settled in with food and laptop to pass the time. Very helpfully they phoned us every hour to let us know how it was going and how far through it was. Around 3 hours after he had left us we had the call to say it was finished, and a few minutes after that Dr Park came to see us, and tell us it had gone exactly as expected.



We then did have to wait another hour before we could see him in Recovery, where the poor little lad was not in great shape. He was having muscle spasms in his legs, which then caused pain in his back, which was not helped by the epidural. We had to wait for some IV valium to be sent up from the pharmacy, but once that arrived he started to settle, although he was still very hot and sweaty, a side-effect from the anaesthetic.

We were transferred to the 12th Floor, where he has a lovely nurse, with whom he did manage a brief chat. He also managed to wiggle his toes for the first time in his life, which was very exciting. However, they will continue to check he can still do that every two hours so I don't want to shout about that too soon. Now he is asleep. He has a lot of tubes and wired coming out of him, although you can't really see them in the photo.



I expect we will be in for a rough couple of days, and he has to stay in bed until Sunday, but at least the op itself is over.


1 comment:

  1. That is such great news....hope there's more toe wiggling to some. Jessamy sends her love to Daniel too xxx

    ReplyDelete