Can You Hear Me Now?

Austin has had ear problems since he was 6 months old. It started with an ear ache and we flew to Seattle for a family reunion. Well, that managed to rupture his ear drum. He's had a hole in his ear since then. We've done a number of tubes in his ears and his ears kept rejecting the tubes. The last tube in his right ear managed to work it's way into his inner ear and was just hanging out. It was causing a lot of infection and the ENT decided it was probably time to go in and fix the hole and find the tube.

We had the surgery on December 5, 2011.
His surgery happened at EIRMC and it went pretty good. The surgery was expected to take just under 3 hours. They ended up in surgery for just over 3 hours. His ear canal was pretty full of scar tissue and they ended up drilling out all of the skin in his canal. They had to take skin from his leg to fix his canal. They found the tube and hopefully we won't be dealing with lots of infections in the future.

When he came out of surgery, he was feeling ok and needed to go to the bathroom. He got up and went and that made him pretty sick. He ended up throwing up and then they wouldn't let us leave until he was feeling better. The nurse told us that it was normal for ear surgery patients to feel sick due to the inner ear being messed with. It took him about 2 1/2 hours to start feeling good.

Justin, Cooper and I spent the day at the hospital waiting. Cooper did a great job, especially since we wouldn't let him crawl around on the floor. He loved being held most of the day.

Justin tried getting a few zzz's in while we waited for Austin to recover!

Cooper just got sillier the longer we were at the hospital.

Austin was crazy about the ice chips and was really hungry after the surgery. The nurse wouldn't let him have anything else though. Once we got home, he took a nap for about 1 hour and then couldn't stand not having food. He had a meatball hoagie and felt great. He had hardly any pain meds afterwards and did great recovering. He couldn't take his bandage off for 24 hours afterwards. Once he took it off, he wanted to look at it. He did. He got sick again. He couldn't believe what his ear looked like. I thought it looked pretty impressive!!

This is the look he sported for 1 week when he went to bed. He didn't want his ear to be ripped off while he slept! He didn't have to wear it during the day, thank goodness!! He only missed 2 days of school (including the surgery). Then it was back to normal.