Those of you that know Avery know that she is pretty much always miserable. She has chronic ear infections, the antibiotics give her a wicked diaper rash, she frequently wakes up at night crying and so on. It is a vicious cycle. After much contemplating and advice from specialists, we decided to go ahead with getting tubes put in her ears. For a quick description of the procedure, go here.
Here she is pre-surgery. We had to wake up pretty early and she had no idea what was going on.
She kept escaping from our waiting room and running down the hall. All the workers were so nice and played with her since we were at a Children's Hospital.
And here she is in recovery. She was pretty groggy and just wanted to cuddle for about 45 minutes afterwards. She didn't cry at all. Either did I (barely).
By lunchtime we were home and she was running around as usual. Her only side effect was this rash around her mouth from the anesthesia mask.
I am hoping that this will help her be able to communicate with us better. She is delayed in speech, possibly because she has had fluid in her ears which impedes proper hearing. In fact, during the surgery the doctor had to drain the fluid from her ears and clean the infection. I just don't think she ever doesn't have fluid in her ears. So hopefully this will be a drastic change for her and improve her quality of life. She is a very brave girl and I am so proud of her.
When Brady came home from school yesterday he said "does Avery talk now?" If only it happened that quickly, we could save a lot of time and money on speech therapy!
2 comments:
Hopefully the tubes help. My #2 was having hearing trouble and ended up having a lot of fluid in her ears, so she got tubes. It seems to have helped. #1 gets speech therapy, so I feel your pain. Good luck with everything. And way to score couple friends that host fun kid-friendly activities! I think I need some of those.
I'm so glad everything went so well! Matthew had ears just like Avery. When he finally got the tubes put in the surgeon said he sucked out fluid from Matthew's ears that was as thick as Elmer's glue and also had to clean out alot of infection. He said that Matthew's hearing with that kind of fluid would be like hearing underwater. No wonder he was barely speaking!
Within months, Matthew's almost non-existant speech started taking off and never stopped. My niece also really improved with speech after getting tubes put in. I think you have good reason to hope that this will help Avery. You are such a good mom to get her in so early. I really regret not having Matthew get tubes earlier.
Good luck with everything!
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