Angels Among Us

We are finally home again after six grueling days at the hospital. Having your child have major surgery is not something I would wish on anyone. However, I have to say that there is no where I would rather have been in this situation that at Primary Children's Medical Center.

From the moment we arrived, everyone was so sensitive to our family's needs. As we prepared for the surgery, Amber, a wonderful Child Life Specialist on staff, came to our pre-op room and helped A.J. understand everything the nurses and doctors where doing. She made that very stressful moment of A.J. leaving our arms for surgery so much easier by holding his hand and walking back with him.

Those next eight hours were very long and very intense. I had barely slept the night before and was so tired but every time I closed my eyes, I pictured my baby on the operating table with his head cut open and I couldn't sleep. We watched dozens of families come and go as their operations were completed and still we sat. Yet there were two wonderful receptionists in the waiting room always full of smiles and cheer who were enough to brighten this very dark moment.

Once A.J. was out of surgery and in the ICU, two more angels in the disguise of nurses helped us through that first 20 hours post op. Tracy was our day nurse and Teresa our night. Both watched out for our boy with such care and compassion that I will never forget them.

Then on Saturday afternoon when A.J. was moved to the Surgical Unit, a whole other group of angels were there to help us. Everyone of them put up with A.J.'s stubborn determination to not take his medicine and not to let us put his eye drops in. A.J. averaged one new IV a day and the IV teams were amazing! I can't even begin to list all the names of all the nice people who took such good care of us.

And we feel very blessed too. During the surgery, our doctor discovered that the growth wasn't causing A.J.'s hearing loss in that ear. He is missing the "anvil" part of his ear and it is repairable. Where before we were faced with permanent hearing loss, we are now looking at his hearing being at the low end of normal. This was a hard way to discover this, but what a blessing to be able to fix it. Even if is does mean more surgery which A.J. insists he doesn't want to have. But this one will be super easy in comparison.

And there was a 14 year old boy, named David, who had surgery the same day A.J. did with the same doctors for a similar, but larger growth on his right facial nerve. His family traveled all the way from Billings, Montana for the surgery and this was his sixth surgery to remove a nerve tumor and he needs at least one more for the same thing on the other side of his head. I can't imagine the sacrifice forced on that family to have to be so far away from home so many times. We are feeling blessed to be only 17.7 miles away from this great institution.

But we still have a bit of the "griff" too. The reason David has had to have all these surgeries is because he has Neurofibromitosis 2 or NF2. This is the genetic disorder that A.J.'s doctors want him screened for. We are trying to take things one day at a time and not get too worked up about it, but at the same time, we can't imagine having to go through this yet again. We have the paper work from the geneticists ready to fill out, but while we know a lot about A.J.'s birthfamily, there is a limit to that knowledge.

In the mean time, we can't come up with enough nice things to say about our doctors, nurses and the rest of the staff at Primary's. I've always heard good things and thought they must be wonderful, but having experienced it first hand, I can say that there are angels among us and they work at Primary Children's Medical Center.