Of Tonsils, Adenoids, and Viruses!

Life just keeps moving and it never stops, does it?!

I had a New Year's Resolution to make sure I blogged more and as you can see, that hasn't really happened.

I hope to get back to blogging about things that have gone on in January and February but this past week has been a really hard one.  A few months ago we started wondering if Matthew was having snoring/sleeping problems.  I happened to notice his tonsils looked enlarged, but not red and inflamed. I mentioned it to the doctor and he referred us to our ENT.  He determined his adenoids/tonsils were, in fact, enlarged. We also had a sleep study that proved that Matthew was having a lot of severe apnea with dips in his O2 levels during the night (umm, hello, scary!).

This made a lot of sense to us and we felt like a lot of pieces of the puzzle were starting to come together with lot of behavioral problems we had been having with Matthew.  Our guess was that he was not being able to get into a deep sleep and was walking around exhausted every day.

Tuesday he had his tonsils and adenoids taken out and had a tube placed in one ear that would just not clear up all fall and winter.

  

This was a HUGE deal for me to hand my baby over for surgery.  I was so nervous and I had so many friends and family praying for us.  It went really well and the Lord took care of what I was most nervous about...handing him over to go back to the OR.  The nurses were great and they let him watch Cars 2 and they wheeled him off and he did just fine.  I was so nervous that he would scream and cry and call for us, but thankfully, he didn't.  It was a  quick surgery and it went well.  We stayed and recovered for most of the afternoon and then headed home.  I got lots of snuggles in, so that was kind of nice even though it wasn't in the way I would have wished!

For the first 2 days things went well and we thought he was just doing wonderfully, and then we got hit hard with his recovery and on top of that he caught a flu-type virus on top of everything.  I have never felt so sorry for him in all my life. Luckily, we had family n town for the part of this but it has been a hard few days for me as I take care of him and try to take care of the other boys too.  We did end up with a late-night ER trip when his fever just would not come down. Even Noah came down with a fever on Friday but his didn't last long.

Even with sick little ones, life goes on.... The boys are out of school for Spring Break so we've been playing, eating lots of ice cream and popsicles, taking tons of Tylenol and Motrin, watching movies, doing puzzles, playing chutes and ladders, and Candy Land. Although it snowed today, we have had a few good days so we have played out back and played with worms and lady bugs (before Matthew got very sick).

Don't squish the worm!

The hardest part of the past few days of Matthew's recovery was just him being in so much pain during the night.  I stayed right on top of the Motrin/Tylenol but he was in so much horrible pain and just screaming so much during the night.  It just hurt my heart so badly.  I finally called the doctor and just demanded that we be able to have something else .  I got them to call us in lidocaine lollipops and a steroid for the inflammation.  This has seemed to do the trick and I'm happy to report we are through the worst of this!  I mainly write this down so that I can remember what happened.

It's strange to walk in the boys' room at night to check on them and I can't even hear Matthew.  He's not really snoring anymore and his breathing is so quiet, so I know the surgery was definitely a good call.  It was a hard call but a good call for him.

Noah knew brother needed to be comforted.

 Feeling better!