Primo was only given one dose of morphine, the morning before his appendectomy. But it seemed to take a pretty long time to make its way out of his system. I am referring specifically to some totally nutty dreams the kid had, the first few nights after his surgery. On the first night, he was so doped up, I don’t think he dreamt at all, was just out like a light, when he wasn’t waking me to navigate the IV pole to the bathroom. But on the second night, when we were at home, things got wild.
I was so bone tired the day we got home from the hospital that I fell asleep at 7pm, literally in the middle of reading Harry Potter to Primo. I just remember reading and then hearing David say, “What happened to Mommy? She was just reading a minute ago.” And then blissful, sublime quiet. But a few hours later, I heard Primo calling and I ran into his bedroom to find him moaning.
“Oh honey! Are you OK? Does it hurt?”
“Ooooooo nooooo, not the Spanish teacher! Not the Spanish teacher!” Primo moaned, writhing around.
“What are you talking about? Oh my God, do you have a fever? Are you hallucinating?”
He didn’t seem to be hot at all. Just wild-eyed.
“Oooooo, ooooooohhhhh. Now I can’t play quidditch! Quidditch is exercise!”
Reality met fantasy. Primo was Harry Potter and Harry Potter had just had his appendix out. You’re not supposed to do exercise after you have your appendix out. So, no quidditch.
“Are you sleeping? PRIMO! You’re sleeping! You are not Harry Potter!”
“Ohhh. Ooooooh. What is a mumble mumble?”
“What? What is a what?”
“What is a mumble mumble?”
“I can’t hear you. What is a WHAT?”
“Oooooohhhhh. Ooooh nooooo. What is a RAVENCLAW???”
Since I was just about as high as he was, except just from exhaustion, I wasn’t much help. I actually tried to answer his question.
“A raven is a black bird and his claw is his talon. I am Nicole Kear and you are my son. You are not Harry Potter. I repeat you are not Harry Potter.”
Next time the kid gets morphine, I am demanding some as well. It really is only fair.
I’ve just added another item to the list of reasons I am infinitely grateful to be living in the year 2011 – not just because we have the internet and air conditioning and elevators and automatic bill pay, but because we have . . .
LAPAROSCOPY.
To tell you the truth, I’m not even sure I know what laparoscopy is. Its some newfangled incredible type of surgery where they insert a teeny, tiny camera into a teeny tiny incision so they can remove your organs and the like without slicing you up like its medieval times. I think that’s pretty much how a doc would explain it, approximately. That’s my understanding of how they removed Primo’s appendix. Oh yeah, one more thing – they pulled the offending organ out through his belly button.
Let’s just pause here to consider how freaking cool that is.
Through his BELLY BUTTON.
I didn’t realize how cool this would be until Primo came out of the operation and I saw that instead of huge, terrifying-looking would dressings on his abdomen, he had three Sesame Street bandaids. I specify that they were Sesame Street ones not only because it is a good detail but to indicate their size, because if you’ve used those kid-brand bandaids, you’ll know they are ¾ the size of regular bandaids, like fridges in European countries.
On a normal day, Seconda is more heavily bandaged than that.
I honestly couldn’t believe it. Yeah, he was high as a kite on anesthesia and yeah, he couldn’t talk because he was hoarse from the breathing tube but at least I didn’t have to wince, and my stomach turn, at the sight of piles of bloody gauze. Thank you laparoscopy, for sparing me that.
Primo was exhausted and woozy and aching but he was relieved the other pain had stopped
”It’s pretty incredible when the patient feels less pain after surgery.” said the pediatric surgeon resident.
The nurses in the recovery area, bless them, gave him a popsicle and wheeled over a flat screen TV which was playing his favorite Harry Potter movie.
And that’s when we turned down the flame on our anxiety to simmer. With that appendix safely out, and nothing stronger than Tylenol necessary for pain relief, it felt like a ten ton weight had been removed from my chest.
That night I slept with Primo, and though cramming my body into a five inch slice of bed with my ass smashed up against the bedrail was not terribly comfortable, the relief of having him within arm’s reach made up for it. It was also convenient.
That night, in my dream, I heard this said, tiny, faraway voice call “Moooooomy! Where aaaaare you?” and the voice kept calling, so pathetically, and I thought, “Won’t someone reunite that poor, sad baby with his mother?” until finally I realized the voice was emanating from my poor, sad baby, lying next to me in the dark
“Honey! I’m here! I’m right next to you!” I exclaimed.
Between the loopy nightmares and the sudden, middle of the night trips to the bathroom, which involved me being ripped from my sleep and having to figure out, in the dark, how to unplug the IV machine and wheel the huge IV pole, with my invalid, woozy son in tow, across the shared room, to the bathroom – well, it was a long night.
Then at 6am, we were awoken by the fire alarm going on. And I do mean going OFF, the lights flashing in the hallways and the blaring siren at full volume, No one else seemed to notice, besides Primo and I, because when I ran to the nurses desk and asked what was going on, they just said, “Oh, it’s the fire alarm. But I don’t think its for us,”
“Of course,” I thought. “What was I thinking when I got alarmed by the alarm?”
So I was delighted on a number of levels when the surgeons told us we could take Primo home after lunch. So was Primo, though shortly before lunch, he discovered there was a room in the pediatric ward called “The Library” which housed a collection of about 4 million kids DVD and approximately a billion video game cartridges. Super Mario Brothers! Harry Potter! Star Wars! It was all just there for the taking. Once that was unearthed, I think he changed his mind about heading home so quickly. But, thankfully, he ate his steamed rice, pita bread and chocolate ice cream like a champ, and we were given the greenlight to go home.
And there was our filthy, tiny home sweet home with our suitcase still packed, passports still on the kitchen table. I don't think I've ever been quite to happy to see it.
Thursday morning, I woke at 6am in the hospital bed with Primo. The two month-old baby who was his roommate, was screaming frantically. Not my favorite way to wake up. Certainly not as good as waking to the sight of Icelandic lava fields.
“Mommy, my belly hurts,” Primo moaned, awake too, “Did they give me the medicine yet?”
“Not yet, honey,” I replied, “They have to check you first.”
I called David, who’d gone home to take over Sec duty from my grandmother, and I told him there was no new news, and that he should take Sec to school. About an hour later, eight men in white coats strode into the room and assembled in a semi circle around Primo’s bed.
“Its appendicitis,” said the white-haired man who looked like Head Doctor, “No doubt about it/”
“You can tell without the ultrasound?” I asked. I am the parent who always has a thousand questions.
“An ultrasound would be nice, but yeah, we’ve seen this a lot and I’m sure that what it is,” said Head Doc, “Either myself or Dr. Crannick with remove the appendix, not sure when but sometime today. As soon as we can.”
“Wow,” I said, “OK, Is that the only way you handle this?”
“Yep,” he said, “You need that appendix out before it ruptures. It’s a dirty business, appendicitis, lots of stool in there and you don’t want it getting out/”
He had me at “lots of stool in there.” I’m no expert but I think it’s a safe bet that, as a general rule, you want to keep stool contained.
“We’ll let you know when we can fit him in,” Head Doc said and the coterie were gone.
“I have to have my appendix TAKEN OUT?” Primo exclaimed. I braced myself for the panic attack of the century,
But instead, Primo panted, “I think I’m gonna throw up!”
Vomiting trumps panic. But you know what trumps both vomiting and panic?
Pain
“MOMMY IT HURTS!!!” Primo yelled, after he stopped throwing up, “MOMMY IT REALLY HURTS!”
When they’d screened him in the ER, the nurse had shown him a spectrum of pain, with 0 being no pain – a smiley face – and 10 being the worst imaginable pain – a Munch-like scream. Primo had been at about a 5. Suddenly, he was at an 8. At least, I think he was. I can’t bring myself to think of him at anything higher.
“OK, OK,” I said, shocked at the sudden change. I pressed the call button and asked the nurse if he could have pain meds now that he was diagnosed and now that he was obviously in need.
“I’ll check with the doctors,” she said.
I don’t know how much time passed but it felt like at least an hour. In fact, it was probably ten minutes. Primo kept screaming and writhing and crying. I tried to console him but every scream was ripping my fucking heart out. When I couldn’t stop myself from crying anymore, I turned my head away from him, so he wouldn’t see. I wanted to go to the nurse’s station to check on the meds but I didn’t dare leave his side.
I sat there, trying feebly to rub his back, caress his head and not have a nervous collapse.
After an eternity, someone who identifies herself as a pediatric resident, comes in to assess Primo to see if he qualifies for pain meds.
“Please hurry,” I cut her off, “This is killing me.”
A minute later, she was injecting morphine into his IV.
“How long will it take to work?” I asked/
“It’s working already,” she said.
And in fact, it had. Primo was so heavy-lidded, he looked like in was lounging in an opium den.
"Where's my morphine?" I asked the resident when Primo was good and loopy.
She smiled. Did I need to clarify that I wasn't fully joking?
"An epidural, at least," I ventured.
She wasn't biting.
Primo stayed nice and loose, falling asleep in the middle of his sentences, all through the second ultrasound (a successful one conducted by the Chief of Pediatric Radiology), through the pre-op paperwork, and up til the surgery a few hours later.
I can't say enough nice things about morphine, really. Morphine rocks your socks off. Morphine is my hero. I can't recommend morphine highly enough.
Tomorrow . . . laparoscopy, hooray!
Six days ago, I was going to Iceland on a romantic getaway with my husband. The bags were packed, the passports were prepped, we’d made turkey and cheese sandwiches for the flight and I’d typed up a list of instructions for my parents who were staying at my house to take care of the kids, full of details about pickup and drop off and bedtime, and how to work the thermostat. David and I got into our traveling clothes and waited for the car service to call to say it was downstairs and ready for pickup. But when it called, instead of taking it to the airport we went to the emergency room.
Primo was having stomach pain. Had been since around lunchtime, he informed me when I picked him up from school at 3.
“I have a bellyache,” he moaned.
“Ok,” I said, “I’ll take you home and you can go to the bathroom.”
You think you’ll stop blaming gas for all your child’s physical maladies when they stop being a baby, but in fact, gas is a perfectly viable culprit up until adulthood. Its gas, I assured him, reading a text from a friend who told me that there was a tornado watch in effect for the Tristate area covering the exact expanse of time I was supposed to be traveling to the airport and taking off for Iceland.
So when Primo did indeed go to the bathroom but felt no better and continued to complain of a stomachache, I thought, come on kid, I have bigger problems here. We may be caught in a tornado and not be able to go to Iceland.
"My belly . . ." groaned Primo.
“Try going to the bathroom again, “ I said. “Gas can be very persistent.”
My parents and sister arrived with their stuff and I showed them where I kept the Children’s Tylenol and how to use the air purifier and what Primo likes in his lunchbox. We sat down to dinner.
“Primo says his stomach hurts,” my mother said.
“I know,” I said, urging him to eat some chicken soup from his prone position on the couch. Then I mouthed to her: “He’s worried. About us leaving.”
Because when gas doesn’t work as a scapegoat, there’s always anxiety.
"I’ll call the doctor to make sure,” I said, and did so promptly. I was so unconcerned, however, that I left my cell phone in my purse and didn’t hear her call when he phoned me back.
Primo ate his soup and lay down to read Harry Potter with my mother while I double checked all our important documents.
“Did I show you where the will is?” I asked my mother, “We got our last will and testament made up.”
“He says his stomach still hurts,” my mother said, “It’s been hours now.”
“Mommy!” moaned Primo, “I just want it to stop hurting. Can you get some medicine?”
It was when he told me that he wanted it to stop hurting that I got that unmistakable dread feeling, that bulls-eye mother intuition which said, “Yeah, something’s up here. You need to investigate further.”
I asked my dad, who’s a cardiologist, to take a look at him and for the first time that day, someone asked Primo where it hurt. He pointed to his lower right abdomen, below his ribs. Not his stomach at all. My father pressed there. He winced and pulled away. My father pressed on the other side. No response.
“Has he been vomiting?” asked my dad.
“No,” I replied, “But he did say it felt like he had to, once or twice. He was nauseous.”
My father was silent but thinking. That never bodes well.
“You need to call the pediatrician back,” he instructed.
At that moment, the car service called to say they were downstairs. I told them to come back in fifteen minutes and paged the doctor again. This time, I was waiting by the phone. In the three minutes of so it took her to call me back, Primo went into his room and feel asleep.
And that’s when we knew we weren’t going to Iceland. Primo has had scarlet fever and roseola and rotavirus and he has never, NOT ONCE, never gone to sleep in three minutes. Clearly, the kid was sick in a needs-immediate-attention way.
I explained the situation to the doctor and she confirmed that it did sound like it could be appendicitis. Maybe not, but definitely worth checking out. She sent me to NYU Hospital, where there was a fantastic team of pediatric surgeons, just in case.
Ten minutes later, my mother, father, David and I were driving over the Brooklyn Bridge, with half-asleep, half-moaning Primo in the backseat, on our way back to the hospital where he was born. Very quickly, we were brought to a stretcher, he was given a blood test and IV and we were off to radiology for an ultrasound. The blood test and IV, while terrifying, had been fast and he’d weathered that trauma well, but the ultrasound was a different story.
To get a good picture, they had to press directly on the spot that hurt him and, of course, the more they pressed, the more it hurt. No matter how much they pressed or how many people attempted the ultrasound, they couldn’t find his appendix, the which they assured me was not uncommon.
Appendixes are assholes. Besides being unnecessary and prone to infection, they are also difficult to find on a sonogram because they’re inside your guts, and obscured by all your other organs like the colon and bladder and stuff. But that didn’t stop these radiologist from trying to find it and hurting Primo like a mofo in the process. The more they pressed, the more he cried out and tensed his abdomen and the more he tensed his abdomen the harder they had to press.
“One more picture,” the technician said, pressing hard.
“YOU SAID THAT AN HOUR AGO!” Primo protested.
He wasn’t wrong. It was a never ending, inferno-esque trial. I frantically asked questions about Harry Potter and the Fantastic Four to distract him, but to no avail.
“I can’t TALK when it HURTS THIS MUCH!” he exclaimed, “Make them stop!”
Then, apropos of nothing, he announced very firmly to the room: “One thing is for sure. I am NOT having my appendix taken out.” He said it like all this was trying enough but to have someone suggest that his organ be removed was just TOO MUCH and he wouldn’t stand for that.
Finally, they gave up. What did them in was when yet another technician came in to give it a shot and asked Primo to point where it was hurting and he said: “No, I won’t! Because whenever I tell you where it hurts, that’s EXACTLY where you press and I told you that hurts much worse and you’re not listening to me so I won’t tell you where it hurts anymore.”
You couldn’t argue with the kid. They’d worn out their welcome. In my opinion, if you can’t find an internal organ within an hour, you give up and try another time or call in the big guns.
So they wheeled him in his wheelchair back to the ER where the pediatric surgeon n call told us she’d like to admit him because they couldn’t confirm it was appendicitis without the ultrasound but it certainly might be and warranted monitoring.
“Can you give him something for the pain?” I asked.
“Unfortunately not. “ she said, “Because the pain is the only thing we’ve got right not to diagnose him. If it gets better, it’s not appendicitis, if it gets worse, it probably is. So we’ll set you up in the pediatric ward and check on him in a few hours.”
And that's when our hospital adventure got started in earnest.
You didn’t think I was going to blow my wad all in one post, did you? This is what they call a good, old-fashioned saga, readers. Check in tomorrow for the continuation of . . . the Appendix Files.
I’m not precisely sure what it is about my husband that sends off that “You want to hang out with me” signal to all my friends’ husbands and the dads of our kid’s friends, but the message comes across loud and clear. I suspect it has something to do with his mix of machismo (Red Meat! Beer! Now!) and sensitivity (cries at The Giving Tree, pained to kill a mouse), and his Southern salt-of-the-earth-ness doesn’t hurt either.
At first I thought this irresistible man-appeal was cool but now I see that David is actually stealing my thunder. I discovered this the night David and I went to a fancy fundraiser for Primo’s school. I suited up in a new red silk cocktail dress with skin-colored fishnets and a ruby necklace from the 1920s that my aunt gave to me. Heels, too, and makeup. I dusted my décolletage with sparkly powder. You know, the whole nine yards.
David put on a white button down shirt and a blazer.
On the way to the party, we pass one of our friends Jerry, a dad of one of Primo’s pals, who I hang out with sometimes on playdates and David hangs out with sometimes at concerts. If that equally distribution of time indicates that he likes David and I equally, that would be incorrect. He has a big time bromance going on with David.
“Hey David!” Jerry exclaims, “Look at you! You look sharp! Nice sports coat!”
I smile, waiting for him to say something about my head-to-toe glamorama makeover. I’m wearing hellfire red for the love of God and there’s cleavage, ample cleavage on offer. Did I mention the heels? When you see a woman in heels and lipstick, you HAVE to note it, even if she doesn’t actually look nice. Even if its overkill and she’s trying too hard and she’s past her prime or whatever, a man is contractually obligated, by virtue of having being incubated inside a woman’s uterus, TO SAY THAT SHE LOOKS NICE. I didn’t make up the rules, guys, I’m just telling you what they are.
“Thanks man,” David says, “We’re going to the school fundraiser, you know how it is.”
“Oh yeah,” says David’s friend, “Well, you clean up nice, man. Real sharp.”
Usually, I restrain myself from fishing for compliments because by my age, I understand what a fruitless endeavor it is. The only compliments you catch when you’re fishing are foul, stinking, dead and rotting compliments, the kinds you have to throw back or else you’ll makes yourself sick. By this time, I couldn’t help myself. I couldn’t let this violation of the “You, man, give compliment to fancy woman” rule.
“HELLO?” I yell, like a banshee, ”What the hell am I, chopped meat?”
At that Jerry looked blankly at him, like he didn’t get it, and then -- “Ohhhhh, yeah!” -- he got red in the face and tried to backtrack.
“Of course, you look great!” he stuttered.
“Yeah yeah yeah.”
“I mean, but you always look great, so you know, I didn’t say anything because you know . . . but David, he never gets dressed up, so that’s why . . “
“I mean, I know you guys have this bromance and all, but come on.”
David laughed nervously, because he knew full well that hell hath no fury like his wife unnoticed.
Jerry laughed, too, and then beat a hasty retreat leaving me no one to punish but my man magnet husband.
“I mean, I know men love you and all but come ON!” I shrieked, “AM I INVISIBLE NOW???”
David rolled his eyes
“LOOK at you! You’re not even wearing a TIE! It took you two minutes to get dressed! And now you’re RUDOLPH VALENTINO!”
“Oh come on, don’t punish me for the misdeed of others.” David said.
“And YOU haven’t said I look nice EITHER!!!”
“You didn’t give me a chance!”
“NOW’S YOUR CHANCE!!!”
Fun times. Shining moments.
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