Playing catchup again. I’m not going to drill into this with way too much detail since this one is such a common procedure.

The ear tube surgery was pretty much a cinch. We ran through the hospitals admission and got upstairs to the minor procedure room pretty quickly, and the nurses told us that we’d be the first surgery of the day. Great! We only had one waiting room we had to hang out in, and the procedure room was right across the hallway. We only had to wait for about an hour until we met with the anesthesiologist, who told us that Alex would only be under for a few minutes, it would be gas-only (no IV), and that he might fight it a bit when the mask was put on him. We could go in with him when they put him under. OK, no problem.

A bit after that conversation they came for Alex. He was given the gas and fought it a LITTLE bit, but he was a trooper about it. No crazy spazzing or crying from our little guy. It was still very emotional to watch him go under, but it was a little bit easier this time since we had a good idea of how he reacted to anesthesia. Soon he was down and we got kicked out of the room.

It was only about ten minutes later that they wheeled him out and into a recovery room. We had to wait another ten minutes or so to give him time to wake up. As soon as he had, we were allowed into the room. He was crying and clearly a little upset, but he wasn’t in horrible shape. He also hadn’t eaten for something to the tune of seven hours at that point, so that didn’t help.

Our ENT popped out at some point (I want to say it was between the surgery and the time we went into the recovery room) to have a quick debriefing with us. He said that everything had gone fine, and that it was a good thing we’d had the tubes put in since a lot of gunk did come out. Of course, I had to ask if getting rid of that would possibly have any impact on him going for CIs, but he said no. It was exactly what I was expecting, but hey, had to ask. Past that, he gave us ear drops that we were to put into both of Alex’s ears three times a day for the next three days and not allow any water to get into his ears for the same amount of time. Past that, he’d be back to his normal self.

We were home way before lunchtime. Alex took two big naps. We cleaned a lot of gunk out of his ears for the following two days and he certainly hated his ear drops, but the whole exercise really wasn’t too bad.

Past that, not much to write about. Shannon and I were both pretty relaxed going in, though we both commented on how much it sucks that this poor guy will have gone through three bouts of anesthesia before he even turns one. It has to be done though, and we’re happy to have that one behind us. His next date with the hospital (knock on wood) will be his actual implantation. That’s going to be much harder to deal with, but I really think it’s going to be the climax of the scary part of this leg of the journey of Alex’s deafness.