and night-night you

Today felt much longer than it actually was, mostly due to officially starting at about four in the morning (with the tracheal endoscopy alert phone call mentioned yesterday) but also due to seeming to run into yesterday evening (due to not really being separated from the official previous day (which seemed to come in two parts: the normal wake-til-almost-home then the additional fraught lengthened evening) by an official worth-the-money sleep). Edgar was sleeping when I arrived and was up, along, gassed and into theatre within the hour. Whilst he was being procedured we were moved to a different ward to await his readiness for return, which unfortunately had many more patients in it which meant that his wailing after we went back up to collect the poor wee lightly-groggy, confused and weak thing (and the news that there had been no visible piece of aspirated fruit in his tubes but that they'd used the child-lung-inhaled-food-removing vacuum/endoscope to suck out a large blob of gunge which was presumably what was causing the reasonably large shadow in the root of his right lungbag in yesterday evening's X-ray) he probably woke a few people up. He eventually started to calm down, regain some co-ordination and settle just as dawn broke, the lights went up and people started moving around.

I'd brought in some snacks and foodlets yesterday evening on the first back-to-home trip so there was something for him to occupy himself with before it became official breakfast-time. It already seemed like afternoon by the time Nicky found out about the parents' showering facilities in the attic and someone came round with a Weetabix and some milk for the boy, which he ate surprisingly gradually. He'd not wheezed since coming back from having his bronchi Hoovered but was a little off-colour (though was too wriggly to keep in the cot and eventually had to be allowed to walk up and down and visit the playroom) and when he eventually went to sleep (which required stuffing him in his pushchair, erecting the cover and trundling him up and down a quiet bit of corridor at the end of the ward) he was still dropping a few too many percentage points of oxygen saturation, though less than the night before.

He'd usually only sleep for half an hour or so in the morning but was probably out for a couple of hours, looking considerably paler and sallower than usual though was deemed 'healthy colour' by the medical people when they came on their ward round (a couple of hours after the ENT ward round, for some reason) though (after successfully stethoscopising him without waking him up) they also described his belly as 'large, soft: normal' rather than the 'somewhat distended' I was expecting. He pinkened up about the cheeks as the afternoon went on whilst we both struggled to stay awake; the various signs requesting NO HOT DRINKS ON WARD were being heeded which meant my only coffee had been on my half-hour turn to pop out for breakfast, though the Sick Kids' proximity to Victor Hugo meant that the coffee was nice and the pain au chocolat tasted like the first pain au chocolat I ever had on a school trip to France.

By evening (after we'd moved ward again) he was almost normal and I'd had a chance to pop out to buy some stuff to keep Nicky going through the night (bumping into a cheering EcoDad on the way between the food-shop and another coffee. Nicky had had another sleep catch-up whilst I walked Edgar to and from one end of the ward to the other, often having to try and prevent him pushing a wee plastic chair all the way along; he was looking less and less like he had any need to be there (though it had been made mostly clear on the morning ward-visit that he'd be in another night to get his intravenous antibiotics administered) and it felt slightly embarrassing wrangling a shoutywriggling healthy child past teeny little invisibly-parented babies (who looked like they were better-suited to being in the neonatal special care unit in the Infirmary) having a gasping contest, pale-looking children lying slackly on beds in isolation rooms and the toy-Hoover-hogging kid with cystic fibrosis we bumped into in the playroom. The shoutiness and absolute refusal to not strop out when put in the cot had made me worried about the night (I'd offered to take a turn staying over but Nicky seemed to feel more less not right about not being there) but when they finally dimmed the ward lights (except, irritatingly, for the one shining right into our cubicle over the top of the curtain) and Edgar had some milk, a rendition of The Big Night-Night Book made him lie down, grab his monkey and start closing his eyes. Routines are handy things. Though he'd twisted round so that his head was jammed against the bars, he was asleep by the time I left.