Phoebe's Surgery

Phoebe has a new look! On March 13th, she went in to have her cleft lip repaired. As I already said, it was a bittersweet day for Jon and I, but overall we are so happy and know that Phoebe is still our same wonderful Phoebe.

The most stressful part of the day was getting to the hospital in time. We left for Seattle Children's Hospital at 5:10 am to get there for Phoebe's 6:30 check-in. When I checked the googlemap on my phone twenty minutes into our drive and it said that, due to a crash, the drive would take 2 hours and 40 minutes, we got a little anxious. But we said a prayer and ended up only being five minutes late.

Phoebe was her normal social butterfly self as we got checked in and met with all the nurses and doctors. I was calm until they took her away...she didn't cry, but I did! But after calming down, Jon and I went out into the main areas in the hospital and waited to see how things turned out.

The nurse in surgery paged us at 10:45 to let us know that everything in surgery was going as planned, and at 11:45 they paged us to let us know that they were done and our doctor was coming out to meet with us. He did, telling us that everything went smoothly, and we expressed our gratitude to him. Shortly afterwards, I went back to the recovery room to feed Phoebe--which they try to do right away to encourage the baby to find comfort in eating rather than in heavy pain medicine--and by one o'clock we went up to join Jon in our hospital room.

You could tell that Phoebe wasn't feeling so well that day. Normally, she wants to see everything and she's never been one for snuggling. That day, however, all she wanted was to be held in my arms, resting her head on my shoulder. She didn't really want anyone but me to hold her, but Dad did a fantastic job at getting her to smile and laugh. Miraculously, the only pain medicine they had her take were Tylenol and ibuprofen, which seemed to get the job done.

The next morning, our old Phoebe was already returning to us. She seemed to be saying: "Get me out of this small hospital room! Let me crawl around! I want to see everyone and do everything!" No more head on the shoulder, and sitting around was boring. Luckily, by this point she was no longer attached to any monitors, so while we waited for things to wrap up, Jon and I walked the halls with her. She loved seeing the murals on the walls and saying hi to the nurses.

We were in the car and on our way by 10:30 that morning! Everyone was more tired than usual, but happy and well.

That was two weeks ago, and Phoebe is healing beautifully! She wasn't taking any medicine by the Saturday after the surgery, and the swelling died down within the first week. Two days ago she got the stents that were placed to help shape her nose removed and the doctors said everything looks fantastic. Phoebe's scar still needs to form a bit more and there's some things they've asked us to do to help with that--like applying gel and doing gentle massages. We'll also be checking in with the hospital about once a year, just to make sure things are going okay and to keep an eye on some things.

We are grateful for all the kind words, thoughts, prayers, and fasts offered on our family's behalf at this time. We have amazing family and friends and were blessed to associate with amazing medical personal throughout this whole adventure (Seattle Children's is fantastic!). And of course, we are blessed to have our wonderful, beautiful Phoebe!