Friday, April 4, 2008

Happy Birthday to Grandma...another year young!

Just a quick update tonight. Hannah and I met with the anesthesiologist today to go over the plan for Tuesday. I had many questions for him including: will Hannah be intibated, what drugs will they use, will they access her port or only use the peripheral IV, will she have the IV following the surgery, etc. He didn't answer any of them! His answer was "ma'am, there are many ways to do things and 50 anesthesiologists on staff and we all do things a bit differently." How could that be? I told him I was surprised there wasn't a standard protocol for this routine type of surgery. Again his answer was, more than one way to do something...ask the doctor when you get there. Hhrrrmmppf! I know that's not even a word, but it was pretty frustrating and totally a waste of time. It only served to make Hannah upset when he said they may access her port (even though we were told they would use the mask to put her to sleep, not the port) and he said she would have the IV still in when she got to recovery. I figured as much, since they need to make sure she is ok before they remove it. That immediately brought on the tears, she just hates IV's ever since January 30th, 2007.

Dr. Scrivins asked Hannah the other day if she would like to keep her port as a souvenir! She answered no very quickly until he told her that there was another girl that kept hers so she could run it over with the car! Of course she thought that was pretty cool, and now she wants to keep it so she can try that trick herself. He said they clean it up and sterilize it, then give it to us in a couple of days. That should be interesting.

We did have some fun today visiting our friend Alec in the hospital (his blog address is www.4theluvofalec.blogspot.com). He is in St. Charles Hospital, where Hannah was after her initial surgery, for physical therapy. He looked great, and is working very hard up there! We recognized a couple of the nurses, and they recognized us too. We really enjoyed seeing Alec and his mom Amy and his angel brother Sean, such a cutie boy! Hannah and I went down to the therapy room to look for Valerie, her therapist, but she wasn't in today. Hannah then started crying saying she wanted to STAY! She wanted to be there and go into the therapy room to do some work. Surprising, right? Keep up the good work Alec, you're doing GREAT! You too Amy!

I told Hannah that we were going to gymnastics tonight, that was her therapy, so that helped! She did great at gymnastics today too, doing many things that she couldn't go when we first started just a few short weeks ago. Up until the very last thing she did, where she landed wrong and just stretched her back a bit, she was awesome! I think she was more tired than anything, and was feeling fine afterwards. She worked so hard, it was great to see her jumping saying that her legs didn't hurt anymore!!

Did I say this was a quick update? I have a photo on my cell phone that I took of Alec and Hannah today, so if I can get it downloaded onto my computer, I'll share it tomorrow. Have a good weekend everyone.

xoxo Kim