The Po Show

Post-Op

I've realized, with guilt and sadness, that it was all well and good for me to talk about Tessa's surgery last Tuesday as "just" a routine adenoidectomy and ear tubes insertion. Topped with the surpise tonsillectomy chaser, it was anything but routine for HER.

I had been afraid of this. How do you explain to a four year old what will happen during surgery? All the moms I knew whose kids had gotten ear tubes had gone through the experience when the kids were two or younger, and you can't explain anything to a child that young anyway. But at almost five, and a very verbal almost five, Tessa thinks in terms of language, and I gave her insufficient language for dealing with this experience. I don't know that I could have done any better (other than warning her that her throat was REALLY going to hurt, rather than telling her it was going to hurt a little, since I was expecting just some referred pain from the adenoidectomy and from the intubation tube) but I am left with the knowledge that what I gave was inadequate.

She is pissed off, and I can hardly blame her.

I don't think she's even in that much pain anymore, though she certainly feels "off." But what she really feels, and feels very strongly, is a form of PTSD, I believe. She's had a traumatic experience, and she doesn't know how to deal with her feelings about what happened to her. She's still not entirely sure what DID happen to her, and she doesn't like that one bit either.

The last two nights, she has not been able to sleep much at all. She falls into a light sleep, and starts literally tantruming in her sleep. Her feet hammer against the bed, her arms flail, she moans and whimpers. She wants me next to her, then pushes against me, hard, then throws her legs over me. Last night she woke up, bunched up her blanket with absolute fury in her eyes, and chucked it away from her.

On Sat. she ran into her room, crying as she emerged a few minutes later. She sat on the couch with me, and cried and cried. Then she told me she had gone into her room to say goodbye to her toys, since she was running away.

I told her, "You don't really want to run away from me, do you?"

"No," she sobbed, "but I just feel so sad!"

She can't deal with her sadness, with her feeling of instability, with all the emotion. Several times in the last two days she's told me, "I can't get past it, what I said about wanting to run away." She wants to escape feeling so shitty, and I don't know how to help her.

Yes, I know she'll get better. I'm not sure yet when she'll go back to school, since one of the post-op side effects she's gotten is REALLY REALLY bad breath, from the bacteria colonizing the back of her nose and throat, and I absolutely do not want some kid from school to tell her she smells bad. Mints, even listerine doesn't help, so I may just keep her home till it gets better as the dead tissue sloughs off. She doesn't need any more trauma right now.

In a few weeks this will all pass, I know, and we hope that her health will improve and make all this so very worth it, but for now, damn it sucks.