No Turning Back: CI SURGERY

In the early morning hours of September 11, we drove through the pouring rain to the hospital.  I was terrified, but tried not to show it.  After Brandt was called back to the OR prep room, it seemed to take ages before I was allowed to go back.  I raced back once I was summoned, trying to act supportive and not at all scared out of my wits.  He was hooked up to an IV, with compression socks and a strange contraption that kept squeezing his legs.  Dr. Awesome briefly stopped in to talk with us, confirming which ear he was operating on and letting us know that the surgery "usually takes exactly 90 minutes."  Then the anesthesiologist came in, and was very excited that this was Brandt's first time getting anesthesia.  I was not so thrilled about it. They wheeled him off to surgery and I struggled to hold it together.  But I didn't want to upset his parents in the waiting room, so after a few quick tears I dried my eyes and walked out of OR prep with my head high.

There was a woman sitting at a desk in the family waiting room, giving updates on patients' statuses.  After we had been in the waiting room over an hour, she announced to us that Brandt's surgery had begun.  I was disappointed because I thought he'd already been in surgery for a while.  I restarted the 90 minute countdown in my head.  I don't know how I managed to keep from driving myself crazy, especially with obnoxious soap operas playing loudly on the tv overhead, but I did.  Exactly one hour after the announcement, Dr Awesome came bursting through the door with a big smile on his face.  It took me so off guard that I jumped out of my seat and screamed, "Oh! You're here already!"  He told us that surgery was a success, and he was glad that Brandt "has such a big head, I had plenty of room to play around in there! Much easier than the one-year-old I implanted yesterday, her entire skull could fit inside Brandt's mastoid."  We thanked him profusely as he told us, "He's going to hate it for the first 3-6 months, then he'll be ok with it, at a year he'll love it, and at two years he'll be ready for another one."

Fortunately we have several friends and acquaintances with CIs, so I was able to send out e-mails with a lot of questions about the surgery and post-op.  So I knew that he needed to sleep in a recliner for the first few nights, that he needed to stick to foods that aren't too chewy, sneezing was going to hurt, and they kick you out of post-op recovery a good hour before you're actually lucid enough to really be discharged.  I still wasn't prepared for the state he was in when he was sent home though.  He could barely talk and his speech was very slurred.  Definitely still loopy.  The nurse told me, "Ok, I'm going to let you get him dressed and ready now!"  I told her that he obviously needed more time to recover and she said, "Nope, he's ready to go home!"  I tried to argue for more time to let him become lucid but she insisted that it was time for him to leave.  I had to stand him up and get him ready by myself, terrified that he was going to fall and split his heavily-bandaged head wide open.  At least someone wheeled him down to the pickup area and got him in the car for me, but I was pretty angry.  I drove home in our new car, only the second time I'd ever driven it, in the rain.  Thankfully by the time we got home, he was getting lucid and was able to walk into the house with my help.  It took awhile to get his pain medication and he was obviously hurting.  He had some trouble sleeping, probably from the pain meds, and was in some pain, but he was able to get up and about much quicker than I had expected.  

48 hours later, the bandages came off.  The incision site wasn't too gorey, and cleaning and slathering it with Neosporin twice a day was easy.  The swelling made his ear stick out a lot farther than the other ear, but I didn't say anything about it.  It's starting to go down so hopefully the ear will flatten back out. Brandt had trouble moving his head in the first week, so if I needed to get his attention he had to swing his entire body towards me.  I had to make sure to always talk to his left ear (which will change once he is activated, to always talking to his right ear.)  He was convinced that he had some residual hearing left in the implanted ear; Dr. Awesome said he had a 50/50 chance of retaining some hearing and we would know once the bandage came off.  After a few days, he wasn't so sure though.  But he was confident that he could function ok at work with only one working ear, so he has been back to work after a week and a half.

We still have another two weeks before activation, and it's torturing me to have to wait this long!  I'm so anxious to see what's going to happen.  We're keeping our expectations very low for the first six months at least, but I'm ready to get this show on the road.

1 week post-op