After about 2 hours of sitting in the waiting room and roaming the hospital, one of the nurses finally came out and told Tasha (I was in the gift shop buying him Steve) that the surgery was over and that everything looked excellent and that we would be heading up to a room shortly. When they first brought Reis out on his gurney, we were in a little shock. It wasn't that we didn't like the work that they had done, it really was the fact that we were used to the way he looked before and he was swollen quite a bit from the surgery and he didn't even look like our little man that we were used to. One nurse took Tasha, Reis and I all up to the room where we were going to be staying for the rest of the day and over night and another nurse took everyone else up to the room to meet us up there. It seemed like he was just going to sleep forever but finally he decided to wake up and when he did, he wasn't really all there from the pain medication that he was on but it was a great feeling to see him awake and in pretty good spirits.
Reis had to wear elbow restraints so that he couldn't move his hands up to his mouth and mess with the fresh stitches and glue that was on his lip. He was also fitted with a pair of nose stents that were about an inch and a half long and stitched into his nose so they would not come out along with tape across the bridge of his nose (not sure why, maybe for swelling??). The nose stents were used to keep his nostrils shaped so that his nose did not go flat. He had a little heart monitor patch on his chest and a vital sign hookup attached to his foot so that they could monitor his vitals at all times.
Feeding was interesting. We had a little rubber tube that was hooked to the end of a syringe (Breck Feeder) that we had to draw up the formula in the syringe and stick the end of the tube in his mouth and push out the formula and let him sallow it without him choking. This really worked pretty good right at first, but then when he decided to get his apatite back, it was very difficult to keep up with how fast he wanted to eat. What we ended up doing was one person would draw up the first syringe full and while one person fed him, the other person would draw up another syringe full of formula and that seemed to work pretty good. The only time we really had any trouble feeding him, was when Tasha and I were on our way home and we had to pull over on the side of the road and try to feed him in our vehicle.
Throughout the day and into that evening, things kind of went a little downhill. Reis decided that he would be upset and when he would get to crying, he would hold his breath and then the monitors would show that and the nurses would come rushing in to see what the problem was. We even had a little incident where the held his breath so long that one of the nurses broke open the emergency oxygen case that was beside his bed and just about jambed a tube down his throat so that he could breathe, but before she could get that done, the other nurse told her to stop and he was fine. I'm not gonna lie, it scared the hell out of me, not the fact that I thought he was not going to breathe, but the fact that this nurse was going to ram that tube down his throat and that our overnight stay was going to turn into a week stay.
As the day came to a close, the hospital wanted to get the majority of the visitors out of the room so that we could settle down and prepare for the night. Most of the night we took turns holding Reis in the rocking chair beside his bed because when he was laying in the bed, he was not sleeping very good so that made for a pretty long night. Finally around 3:00 in the morning, I was able to lay Reis down in the crib and get some good shut eye.
The next morning we were scheduled to get out of the hospital around 11. Most of the family came back early that morning and helped get everything ready for our departure. The nurses made sure that all of Reis' vital signs were in good order before they would discharge us and finally around 12:30 we left the hospital and headed to Eric's house. We decided that we would stay another night in KC since we really didn't want to have to drive all the way back to SC with Reis just getting out of the hospital, so we just went to Eric's and hung out there for the rest of the day.
For the first week we had to leave the tape on the bridge of his nose, the elbow restraints had to stay on at all times except to take a bath and to let him move his arms around and the nose stents were stitched in and had to stay in until we got back to the hospital for our one week checkup. Reis didn't seem to mind the elbow restraints too bad since he wasn't really mobile yet at this point. With the nose stents, came irrigating the nose stents. This was a pretty rough procedure since we had to take saline solution and draw it up into a syringe and with a IV needle attached to the end of the syringe we stuck the needle up in the nose stents and squirted the saline solution into his nose to keep the stents cleared out so he could breathe. As you can imagine, he did not like this at all since one of us had to hold his face still while the other one squirted the solution.
At our one week post operation checkup, they took off the tape from his nose and they cut the stitches out of the nose stents. They then showed us how we were going to have to tape the nose stents in his nose since they had to be in for at least 12 hours per day. We decided that we would put them in while he slept so that they wouldn't be bothering him during the day while he was awake. They told us that after about 3 months of doing the nose stents we would probably be able to stop doing them. Along with the nose stents, we had to go get some scar cream that we had to rub on his lip a couple of times a day for several months.
Throughout the next several weeks we took a couple trips back down to KC for post operation checkups and Reis was progressing just as they had predicted.
