a painful change of plans

this was not supposed to be my post today.  when i left work yesterday, i knew that a blizzard was coming in, and so i felt pretty confident that i would get a nice snowy day at home today, full of shoveling snow of course, but also full of warm fires and maybe a movie. 

not exactly.

when i got home shannon told me that cade had been playing with my irish penny whistle, and that he was horsing around with jack and he ended up falling on it, cutting the roof of his mouth.  i didn't really think much about it, until he was acting like this at dinner:

so i got a flashlight and looked at the roof of his mouth.  ouch.  it didn't  look good.  it looked pretty scary, actually. so we called his doctor's office who advised us to go ahead and take him to the emergency room.  i arrived there with him around 8:30, just as the beginning of the snow began to fall.

we didn't have to wait long until we had a bed, and the little man was already proving his meddle.  despite an abundance of nurses and doctors and students and janitors and just about every other cast member of scrubs, he just took it all in stride, even though it was already way past his bedtime and his mouth must have been really hurting. 

the e.r. doctor took a look at his mouth and decided that it was a sensitive enough area and a big enough laceration that he needed to call in a specialist to take a look.  so, dr. schwartz, an ear, nose and throat doctor, was called in through the snow.  he arrived quickly and took a look at the wound.  he advised that the cut needed stitches, but that it was in a tough spot, so the only way to do it would be to put him under general anesthesia.  there was only a question of how soon we could do it.  so we got him in his gown (with clowns on it!?!) and got him started on his respitory treatment. 

it wasn't long before they wheeled him into the operating room, where i was amazed at his bravery and continued willingness to face this with his head up.

i sat in the waiting room while the performed the operation, which required 4 stitches to the soft pallette.  apparently he was pretty lucky, as the severity of the cut could have made it quite dangerous if it had been a few centimeters in other directions.  after the procedure, the doctor came and got me and i got to be with cade as he came out of the anesthesia.  he was groggy and kept wavering between sleeping and crying.  as a father who was just apart from his little boy, i was just glad he was alive.

after monitering him in post-op for about an hour, they took us to the pediatric unit and got him a room, where they continued to poke and prod and measure and ask questions, and every nurse was amazed at his calm spirit and courage.  here he is at about 12:30 in the morning, just ready to go to sleep.

he finally got to sleep around 1:15, and i tried sleeping on the pull-out cot they had there.  that wasn't very successful, but i was able to sneak in a few z's here and there.  i woke up around 5 and saw cade in his favorite sleeping position, so i took a picture

the doctor came back around 7:30 am to check him out.  he said the cut looked great and that we could go home this morning.  cade will need to eat soft foods for at least a week, and will have to be on antibiotic to ward off infection, but otherwise things went well.  we just had to wait for all the iv fluids to drain.  while we waited, he watched scooby doo and ate breakfast.

we were finally given the ok to drive home.  which was perhaps the most stressful part of the whole ordeal, because the snow had really picked up by then, and i could barely see the road, and really struggled to get the car through the snow. 

but we finally made it, and once he was in his own evironment with his mommy and his brother, he returned to form and you wouldn't even know that anything had happened to him. 

so, it wasn't the night/snowday i had expected.  it was a rough night, actually.  but i was amazed at the strength and courage of the two-year old human who is my son, who bravely faced the less-than-ideal circumstances that were thrust upon him and made the best of each moment of the long night.  and after all that, we've got a foot of snow outside (and still snowing), a fire in the fireplace, and maybe even a movie on the way.  that's more like it.