Saturday morning

Some days, morning comes far too early. Our Saturday nurse is out on medical leave, which means on Saturdays, one of us has to be up by 7 when the night nurse leaves for report...and then frequently, I head back to bed, and turn the baby monitor on.

This morning is no exception, except I couldn't sleep.

I'm over-tired and stressed and still feeling rather depressed. My spouse and I both appear to have caught some cold from the hospital, and when he's sick, he tosses and turns and snores worse than usual. My tummy is unhappy about something, and so here I am with dry cheerios and a cup of tea, watching Acorn sleep on the video monitor.

Acorn is not even 48 hours post surgery, which has brought its own issues.

At some point, I'm going to have to write more about this whole nursing thing - the good, the bad, and the ugly, because I don't think most people really fathom how this works out.

But today, I'm just talking about today. So... nurse reports that Acorn was very restless. She did not give Tylenol w/ Codeine (good, because we asked her not to) but she feels he must be restless because of pain, and thinks we should reconsider.

Let's see. He's a day and a half post surgery, he has a tube sutured in place in his penis and a piece of tegaderm trying to release itself from his penis as well, and he is usually sensitive to wet diapers, but because of the tube, he drips urine all the time instead of peeing and then having dry pants for a while when you change him. He's on medication for bladder spasms (which, if you've never had one, are amazingly uncomfortable), but the same medications dry up his secretions to the point that the nurse had commented on him being awake from 4-6 and desatting constantly, and her finally suctioning a huge mucous plug out.

No....none of that could possibly be making him restless. Not at all.

Not to mention the fact that codeine makes him pace the floor...which means when he sleeps with codeine on board, he tosses and turns all night.  We learned tihs last surgery, and this same nurse went ahead and gave the codeine after we'd suggested not doing so, having noticed his twitchiness, and then she complained that he was still restless after she gave it.

ahem.

Anyway. He's laid here for the more than an hour she's been gone, and not moved once. Some restless night, huh?