Hello again Banner Childrens

This is Tati and I.. at about 3 am Saturday morning at the Pre-Op at Banner Desert Children's Hospital.

It all started out having a fun time at home w/ our friends and all the kids were just running around having a great time. Unfortunately Tati and Hailey collided and Tati's incisor got knocked out..which doesn't take much, since about all her teeth are capped and have no roots.

So, there was a lot of blood and no tooth to be found. Therefore we suspected she swallowed the tooth. We got the bleeding under control and she was fine..didn't cry too much and recovered quickly. Then, I could hear her wheezing a little and got out my stethoscope to listen to her lungs, to see if she aspirated the tooth. Evidence was clear that she had, so I took her to the ER. This was around 8pm Friday the 28th.

We get to the ER and the waiting room is packed! Great, but I figured she would take precedence over most other kids, and we got in right away. So They ordered an x-ray and the tooth was clearly in her lungs (her right lung). which is where I had heard the wheezing, so that's good...now they just need to get it out. So next step was to do sort of like a bronchoscopy, along with fluoroscopy and try to find the tooth and take it out w/ their tools..hoping not to puncture anything in there!

I'm a little worried, as any mother would be and to make matters even worse, there is a child we are waiting for who was in the OR having the same procedure done! which was taking over 2 hours.. what! I do not want Tati under general anesthesia for over 2 hours, no thank you..and what are the odds? although, the other patient didn't have a tooth, it was some other object which was not disclosed..either way, I was then even more worried after I met the close to 80 year old surgeon..who was just working on a patient for over 2 hours..hhmm, I hope his hands are steady. Well, off she goes to the OR at about 3:30am. Next I had to sign disclosures, etc and one of them said that the risk of damaging teeth during procedure is more likely if patient has caps,etc.. ok, Tati already has 3 lost teeth, we kinda need to keep the rest..although the 2 front teeth could make a nice passage way for the ET tube so I guess that's a good thing.

I then have to wait in the waiting room, patiently at 3:30am not sleeping. After about an hour goes by, I decided to call into the PACU and then the nurse can call into the OR to see how things are going. She was doing fine, but strangely they cannot find the tooth. Now, of course Brant gave her a father's blessing and don't know how many prayers were said, alot. Either way, the tooth was M.I.A. Then, they decided to take another x-ray of the whole abdomen and chest area. The surgeon comes back about 40 minutes later and says that the tooth was in her stomach..very strange. (Also we find that Dr. Grisony was another surgeon helping in the OR, who I remembered because he was the surgeon that placed her broviac June 2005) First, for anyone that doesn't know anatomy..the only way for this to have happened would be that she would have had to cough the tooth up and then swallow it..and that seems pretty hard when she is asleep, but it happened and we are grateful and don't care to question any small miracles the Lord brings our way. Our Tati is a very special girl and I am reminded of that every day..especially when mysterious things happen.

So, I get to go back to the Pacu and then we take her up to the PICU. Anytime any kind of surgery or intubation is done, they need to have close surveillance on a patient. So we spend the morning in the PICU (night for me, since I didn't sleep yet at we got to the PICU at about 5:30am) I finally got to sleep around 6:30am and slept until about 10am, as well as Tati, which was great, she actually got to sleep quite a bit. She woke up briefly after anesthesia and then fell back asleep and slept the rest of the night. She did great..she's the patient every nurse wishes to have :) you can move her, poke her, make all kinds of noises, when she is tired she will just sleep.

Unfortunately, we were supposed to go to her pre-k field trip to the fire station, which I scheduled. I will just have to taken her another time with just her or with some friends.

While Tati was still sleeping in the morning around 10am, I went down to the Banner Bistro to get something to eat, which didn't have much since it was between breakfast and lunch. so I ate some mysterious flavored bagel, not sure what it was, but it wasn't great..oh well. Then, Tati finally woke up and was allowed to eat when it was about lunch time. She got chicken fingers, rice and peas. After helping her eat some of it, I noticed the chicken wasn't fully cooked.. gross! (let's just say Tati and I are paying for that now).

Tati was doing really well and was discharged around 1:30pm. We went and visited good ole Hem/Onc and all the nurses there were new and we didn't know them, but some knew who Tati was and we missed Dr. Williams :(

So, this was our adventure for the weekend. Tati requested to have an ariel polly pocket, so we went to Target, but they didn't have ariel so we got aurora (sleeping beauty) and she'll find it under her pillow tomorrow morning. She wanted to get her tooth and give it to the tooth fairy. I do not wish to find her tooth as it comes out.. so she will just get the toy. The really nice Pre-Op nurse Heidi gave Tati a gift..she got to chose between the young turtle from Nemo or Roo and she chose Roo from Winnie the Pooh :)