Not that I expected anything else . . . Samuel is an amazing trooper, and everything went wonderfully and exactly as it should.
I woke Sam up at 6 this morning, he was alert right away, and was smiling and singing on the way to the hospital. Once there, though, it didn’t take him long to start in on the usual chorus of “Back car, go home.” And not one bit of surprise, the waiting was the hardest part. Sam had way too long to realize he was in a place that involved him and doctors, and he didn’t like it one bit. I’ve had my share of dealing with this, but I think it was a bit newer to Erik. Sam and I tried to go for a walk while we waited to get called back to the nurses station, and he did calm down a bit . . . just in time for us to get the call to head on back.
At this point, Sam started wigging out pretty dang good! The nurses couldn’t get his baseline because he wouldn’t calm down and sit still. They tried his arm, his foot, and his fingers. Little Stink finally held still enough with 3 of us trying to soothe him and something distracting on the TV. We managed to catch the last 3 minutes of a Curious George episode, which may have been a bad thing. All it did was add one more thing to Sam’s crying chant, “Back car, go home, watch George.” {The hospital pjs? Too cute! Hehe.}
The surgical nurses and anethesiologist came back for a quick chat, and it didn’t take them long to decide Samuel needed a sedative before they took him to surgery. I am actually really glad we did that, it made things much much easier, and even a bit comical. I was holding Sam, so I wasn’t really looking at his face, but after a few minutes Erik said, “Oh yeah, he’s doped up now.” Samuel was so loopy it was pretty dang funny. He couldn’t really hold himself up, he was playing with his hands, slurring his words, and randomly giggling. I didn’t get the best of it on video, and had to cut it short when the nurses came back in, but you’ll get the idea!
So next was the hard part, the part I was dreading most. Time to say goodbye. One of the nurses picked him up, and Samuel whimpered and whined but that was about all he had in him. It couldn’t have been 7 minutes later when our surgeon came back in and said he was done. The first thing he told us was, “I am glad we did that. He really needed it.” There was still tons of fluid in both of Samuel’s ears, and he had been suffering at least 25 decibels of hearing loss for who knows how long. We had to wait a bit longer to get our little Samarama back, but soon enough we heard his cough and a familiar voice down the hall calling, “Daddy. Daaaaaddy.”
Samuel was still pretty loopy {cranky loopy this time, not funny loopy} but we were all glad to be back together. We knew Sam was back to normal when he started crying for his own clothes, his shoes back on, and, you guessed it, ”Back car, go home, watch George.” The nurse was just about to let us go when . . . BARF! Up came all of the juice Sam drank since waking up. Ugh. More waiting. More very unhappy Sam. A lady across the hall with her son came over and handed Sam a Matchbox car, which we thought was so sweet. Finally finally, we got the go ahead to leave. We were done! Finished! Out of there! Well, almost. Walking past the cafeteria on the way out, Sam quickly remembered what he had spied on the way in . . . a doughnut! Like we could say no!!
So we got home right around 9:30. Sam ran over to his spot in the window behind the sofa, and began playing with his new car. The morning was a super success, and I would certainly say at this point, Sam is 100%.
Phew. So what’s next?! Ha. 
