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!
