Sweet little Owen is doing so great! He is the toughest little guy I know! The day of the surgery it took some time to get him feeling comfortable and he had to have some stronger pain meds, but by the next day he was on Tylenol only for pain. I can't believe it. I was so nervous that he would be hurting and we wouldn't know, but he seems to be feeling just fine! We can hold him and move him around to burp him or change him and it doesn't seem to cause him any pain at all. Thank goodness!
Our first night home was the roughest of all. On the side of Owen's back, he has an incision and then right beside it he has what's called a "Penrose Drain". It basically just looks like a small, soft, white, tube sticking out of his skin that has a little stitch holding it in place. The Doctor taped a little bit of gauze over it and told us that we would need to change the gauze once or twice a day when it got "damp". Well....this was NOT the case for Owen. Just to get him home, we had the usual gauze taped over it and then a burp rag folded up under his sleeper. By the time we got home (it was a good 45 minutes to hour later), he had soaked through all of it and continued to leak this heavy the rest of the night. I finally gave up on the tape because I was changing it so much his skin was getting all red and raw from us peeling it back off every half hour. So for his first night home I ended up putting a few 4X4 gauze pads over it and the folding up two washcloths to put over it and swaddling him in a receiving blanket. This would stay dry for less than an hour! He would end up sopping wet along with all of his bedding. It was exhausting and by morning we were starting to get concerned that something wasn't right. We called the office and they asked us to come right in so they could check him over. That was probably the longest ride of our life because we had no idea whether it was just something easy to fix or something that could involve him going back into surgery! Thankfully, they did an X-ray and confirmed that everything from the surgery looked perfect. They told us that this was way more than usual, but that given the amount of urine that was trapped in his kidney on top of the usual anticipated drainage, he was just going to have a lot for awhile. They decided to attach a bag to catch it all. This drain helps any urine that escaped into his body during surgery to leak out, as well as any urine that is leaking out of the incision site on his ureter. Once his ureter completely heals, it will go into his bladder like normal and the drain should start leaking less and less. The good news in all of this, is that it's a great sign that his right kidney is functioning well! The Doctor told us after surgery that his nuc med study showed that Right kidney as functioning 50% (each kidney functions 50/50 so that is basically 100% function!). He told us after seeing the kidney himself that he "didn't believe the scan", but now seeing all this drainage maybe it was right. It's incredible really that it was so stretched and not affected! He did decide to cut some stretched tissue (? or some sort of stretched part) of the kidney off to try and reduce the size of it and we're hoping it will shrink up some more over time. They drained 5 ounces of fluid off of it when they cut the block and there was more that managed to leak. Our Doctor is really amazed at Owen's whole situation! Randy and I are just so thankful for all of you that have been praying for Owen since we found all of this out at 20 weeks. Every bit of the above is an answer to all of our prayers! So thankful that God was watching over Owen and protecting him the whole time.
Now, four days post op, Owen is amazing! It's like we've been given a whole new baby! He was so unsettled and cranky these last couple weeks and now he is back to being so content. He's smiling and coo-ing at us and will finally sit in his bouncy chair and swing without needing to be held and rocked. It breaks my heart to think he might have been in pain that whole time, but I'm thankful that it's over and he is doing so well. He still has the drain open on his back and now has a little bag attached to it that we can uncap and empty every couple hours. It's still draining pretty heavy, but it should hopefully begin slowing down soon. His incision looks great and we have been able to spread his Tylenol out a little more to every 5 hours instead of 4. It's not much, but we're trying to go little by little until we can see how he does. He can't tell us if it hurts, so we're having to just watch him and see if he seems more irritable or uncomfortable. So far he doesn't seem to mind. Hopefully he wont need it too much longer.
Thanks so much for being such wonderful, supportive, friends! Our family is so very blessed to have you all in our life!
Arriving at his pre-op room.
A nervous Daddy texting updates to family and friends
He had to stop nursing four hours before surgery so the poor guy was so hungry and couldn't understand why I wouldn't just feed him!
After surgery he was in the PICU for 30-45 minutes while he came off the anesthesia and they got his pain under control. Then they moved him to his room to rest. These were taken about and hour or so after surgery so he was still pretty out of it..
Day 2! Getting ready to go home!
