Jack's Surgery

I may as well state the obvious. I've been away from the blogosphere for a long time. What happened, you ask? Well, Facebook for one. I got sucked in and it's easy, immediate and permits you to post not much more than quick sound bites. Perfect, in other words, for a working mom with two busy boys. Which brings me to the second thing that happened. T-ball! I'll post about that another day (go ahead and snicker, it's Ok!), but Michael and I had the pleasure of being a T-ball coach and T-ball Team Mom respectively for Jack's team this past Spring. And man oh man...were we BUSY! It was a lot of fun and a lot of work. But as I said, more on that later.

As many of you know, our little Bubbers got quite sick this past month and had his first (and pray to God last!) surgery. He got sick at Papa Floyd's and Grandma Diane's during a Friday night sleep over, but not sick enough to want to come home (after all, he was at Papa and Grandma's!). By the next morning, Grandma thought he had a fever and he was still throwing up, so we drove to Auburn to pick him up. We all thought he had a nasty little flu bug that was hitting some of his cousins. He threw up for a solid day and had a low-grade fever. By Sunday, he had stopped throwing up but he said his tummy hurt. You can see in the picture that our little guy just didn't feel very good.


So, we took him to the doctor first thing Monday morning, and Dr. Dresser thought the virus might have settled in his intestines and caused an infection, but didn't think it was appendicitis because Jack didn't have the "standard" symptoms (which, as an aside, I no longer believe exist). So, we took him home with orders to watch for a high fever and the vomiting to resume, which never happened. The doctor also said we should see his appetite improve and his activity level start to get better, which did happen...but mostly, I think in hindsight, because of Jack's sheer determination.

By the following Thursday, Jack was walking like an old man and said his back hurt, so Friday morning we were back in Dr. Dresser's office. He barely palpated Jack's tummy and Jack started to cry and scream. So we were ordered to the emergency room post haste. We went to Mercy Hospital in Folsom, where they took his blood and did an ultrasound within two hours. The ultrasound showed that his appendix had perforated (a fancy way of saying burst) and formed an abscess, but interestingly he had no fever and his white blood cell count was completely normal. They called the surgeon in and it took a couple of hours for him to arrive, but when he got there he got Jack into surgery within an hour.


Jack did great during surgery. It turns out, the lining in his abdominal cavity had created a protective little pocket around the appendix and contained the infection. It was pretty bad, but clearly God was taking good care of our baby.


Friday night and Saturday were kind of rough. By Sunday, Jack was starting to play a little with his Star Wars characters.




By Monday, he was walking around....




And chatting with his big brother...



And asking for a hamburger and french fries...(which he only ate a bite or two of, but hey! That was huge!)



And ready to go home!

We were so happy to bring Jack home. My birthday was two days later and having him home and on his way to recovery was the best birthday present *ever!*

He's still healing, but thanks to God's love and care, he's doing a lot better. We'll keep you all posted!