Miss H got her ear tubes yesterday. I posted last month about having to cancel. Well, yesterday it was successful but it had a fair share of trauma for all of us.
I had gotten various degrees of conflicting advice from friends, co-workers and the doctor about how exactly we should prepare Miss H for this whole thing. Some people said not to talk about it, others said to give her some details and a few said to tell her as much as we knew. Well, since she is only four, we decided to go with telling her some of the details and talk about the things that might bother her the most. We knew she would have to put on a hospital gown, get her temperature taken, get her blood pressure checked and have a mask put on her face. We talked about all these things the few days before and always tried to balance it out with spending the day with Mom and Dad, the play area at the ‘fancy doctor’ and how it would be really quick and then we would go to McDonald’s.
First issue- the hospital gowns had CATS on them. She wanted one with DOGS. Then they had to put a bracelet on her (we forgot about that part). Notice the bracelet is on her ankle and what you can’t tell is that the gown is on backwards.
But, we did get to spend a short amount of time in the play area.
And, I had to wear this ridiculous paper get-up. Even me trying to make her laugh was not working.
The time in the play area was not long enough (according to Miss H) and since they were ahead of schedule, it was time to head to the OR. This is the point where the meltdown occurred. She was scared. There were lots of doctors and nurses with masks on. It was really cold and I was carrying her into a really freaky looking room. She wanted nothing to do with any of it.
I felt terrible.
But, it was really quick and she met us in recovery room with as much anger as she had left the play area with. After some water, a popsicle and thirty minutes of watching Sponge Bob we headed home. She wanted nothing to do with going to McDonald’s but we did get some cuddle time at home.
She slowly forgave us for the whole ideal and we did get to McDonald’s.
Then it was back to regularly scheduled programming for the rest of the day.
On the positive side, I think she is already hearing things better. Is that even possible??
all three of us 