Ammon will be having a surgical procedure this Monday (July 19th) under general anesthesia at Mott Children’s Hospital. It is a cystoscopy, EUA and urethral dilation. Basically they will use a tiny camera to go into his urethra to check things out and also dilate the opening of his urethra. Besides being born with a heart defect, the poor little guy was also born with another defect (hypospadias) which had to be surgically repaired when he was a baby (after his heart was stable….so not until he was 13 months). The urethra opening now seems to be constricted, so the urologist wants to dilate it to see if that will fix things. Hopefully, the urologist won’t find any other problems along the way. It should be an outpatient procedure.
Unfortunately, the surgery is scheduled for 3:15 pm. So, he can’t eat anything after 8:00 am. This will be a problem for Ammon. He normally eats every couple hours, especially during the first half of the day. I always joke that he eats breakfast, then a second breakfast (as big or bigger than the first) before eating lunch. He seems to metabolize his food fast, so he needs to eat frequently or he gets irritable and sometimes out of control. I’m trying to figure out how I can keep him happy all day without any food. He can have water, apple juice and pedialyte up until noon. I’m making a list of activities we can do to keep him distracted. Fortunately, he LOVES to read books (actually he can’t read yet, so we read to him). Right now he has 67 books checked out of the library! So, obviously we will be doing a lot of reading Monday. I’m also going to let him take a very long bath. He loves baths!
We went to Mott’s a week and a half ago to visit the Procedural Readiness Center, and they had someone explain to Ammon what will be done the day of the procedure and showed him around. They also gave him a “doctor bag” of goodies to bring home (several masks, those blue surgical caps they wear, vinyl exam gloves, and a few other medical supplies) to help him get comfortable with all of that. Well, you’d think it was Christmas morning for him!!! When we got home, he played with these things for 2 hours straight! Now he’s actually looking forward to going back. I love Mott’s!!!
Unfortunately, the surgery is scheduled for 3:15 pm. So, he can’t eat anything after 8:00 am. This will be a problem for Ammon. He normally eats every couple hours, especially during the first half of the day. I always joke that he eats breakfast, then a second breakfast (as big or bigger than the first) before eating lunch. He seems to metabolize his food fast, so he needs to eat frequently or he gets irritable and sometimes out of control. I’m trying to figure out how I can keep him happy all day without any food. He can have water, apple juice and pedialyte up until noon. I’m making a list of activities we can do to keep him distracted. Fortunately, he LOVES to read books (actually he can’t read yet, so we read to him). Right now he has 67 books checked out of the library! So, obviously we will be doing a lot of reading Monday. I’m also going to let him take a very long bath. He loves baths!
We went to Mott’s a week and a half ago to visit the Procedural Readiness Center, and they had someone explain to Ammon what will be done the day of the procedure and showed him around. They also gave him a “doctor bag” of goodies to bring home (several masks, those blue surgical caps they wear, vinyl exam gloves, and a few other medical supplies) to help him get comfortable with all of that. Well, you’d think it was Christmas morning for him!!! When we got home, he played with these things for 2 hours straight! Now he’s actually looking forward to going back. I love Mott’s!!!
Here's are some pictures of Ammon playing surgeon. He has 4 surgical hats on at once. And notice that he has the vinyl gloves on his hands AND ON HIS FEET!!! He insisted on that!
Here he is working on his patient (his teddy bear he named "Zero.")
"Oh no! I forgot to put his heart back in before closing him up!"
In the next one it looks like he's doing CPR on his teddy bear!
Jared then gave Ammon a pizza cutter so he could pretend to operate on him (he's so silly and sick all at the same time). Funny that Ammon immediately went right to cutting open his chest to do open heart surgery.
When he listens to our heart with the stethoscope and can't hear anything he says in such a matter of fact way, "Well Daddy, I guess you don't have a heart."
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