My Poor Baby Girl

Well, we had our first hospital run and surgery for our little family yesterday. This picture is Charity when she woke up this morning after the surgery late last night. Here's the story:
At about 7:00 in the morning, I was taking apart a jumper seat that Samuel doesn't use anymore. Charity grabbed one of the polls and started to run away, so I grabbed it to keep her from disappearing with it. Unfortunately, she came back with the poll, and caught her eyelid on the end of the metal poll. Of course I was freaking out. She was bleeding and Hyrum wasn't home and I didn't know what to do. I tried calling Hyrum, but couldn't get ahold of him. So I realized I was going to have to decide and figure out on my own how to handle this situation. Since I really didn't know the extent of the damage, and I felt absolutely awful, I thought it would be best to just head up to the hospital and continue calling Hyrum the whole way there, since the hospital is 35 minutes away from us. Samuel was still asleep, I was in pajamas and Charity was in her underwear, so I hurriedly got myself and charity dressed, then got Samuel and got everyone in the car. It's surprising how fast you can get going when you're really motivated. So we are driving along, and I am trying not to throw up or cry too much. But each time I look in the rearview mirror which I pointed to Charity to keep an eye on her, I got nauseous. Luckily she fell asleep, and right before I got to the hospital, I finally got ahold oh Hyrum. So he had a doctor waiting for us when we got there. The doctor does an initial check-up, and calls the optomologist to come look at her. The cut was in the corner of her eye, so he was worried the canaliculi (tear duct passage way) on the top was cut, and said we needed to take her into surgery. He was an excellent doctor and so kind to us (even when it was his birthday and he could have been home much much earlier if we weren't there) so we felt very blessed to have him looking out for us. Charity had eaten breakfast this morning, so they couldn't do the surgery until she hadn't eaten or drank anything for 6 hours. So we went home to wait out the time and try to keep Charity from getting anything into her mouth. She was surprisingly good and never complained about her poor eye. We came back to the hospital at 2:00, and were told there was someone in the surgery room ahead of us, and it would be 30 to 45 minutes. A couple hours later they told us that it was taking a lot longer than they thought, and it would be a few more hours. Keep in mind that this whole time Charity had not eaten or drank anything. She kept telling me she was thirsty and she wanted water. It was breaking my heart. We had lot's of visitors to distract us though, since Hyrum works at that hospital and knows the people there. (They were all so sweet and concerned about our Charity.) About 7:00 they finally got her in to have the surgery. After about an hour the nurse came out to tell me that it had cut the canaliculi like they were afraid of and it would take a few hours to repair it.



They put a little tube from the upper lid tear duct, through the lower tear duct, and tied it off in her nose so that the canal can heal correctly. You can see in the above picture how they had to do that. They then had to do 5 sutures to repair the cut and get everything back in place. So at 10:00, 3 hours after they began, Charity was finally out of surgery. Everything went great. We went with her to recovery where she threw up blood a couple times on Hyrum, but otherwise was still very out of it from the anesthesia. They said we could take her home, but they wanted her to urinate first. Since she hadn't had anything to drink all day, it took some time. I left at about 11:30 to go pick up Samuel (our amazing friends the Honeycutt's were kind enough to watch him all day while all of this was going on). Then Hyrum didn't get home with Charity until 1:30 in the morning. We moved her bed into our room and she slept great all night. When she woke up in the morning, her poor voice was all scratchy from the anesthesia and her nose had all this dry blood underneath it (we knew she would have a bloody nose for a whiel from the surgery) and her eye was completely gunked up so that she couldn't even open it. She was in a good mood though, and layed there for a while and just talked with me and let me sit by her while she drank some sprite. I started getting pretty nauseous (which happened a lot during this process. I do not do well with seeing my baby in pain and bleeding and all gunky). So I layed my head down on her bed, and in her sweet little raspy voice she asked me "Mommy, what's wrong?" She had gone through so much, and couldn't be feeling well herself, still she was concerned about me. It melted my heart. So she is recovering fine, and they say she shouldn't even have much of a scar. The tube will stay in for about a year and then they will take it out, and she should be good to go. And even though this has been so hard to see her go through, I was amazed and so touched at how everyone immediately reached out to us and did all they could to help and comfort us. I couldn't believe the kindness of the doctors and friends and church members. Even though we have only lived here a couple months, it is simply amazing the support group we have and the wonderful people who surround us. We are truely blessed.
Here are some pictures of her as she was able to start opening her eye again today.