This is a follow up to this post.
It is 10pm and we have just arrived home from hospital. The day progressed as you would expect, with my son becoming hungrier and tired. We watched two films and played cards for a bit before he got quite tearful and generally fed up. However I am really proud at the way he coped with being so uncomfortable and waiting so long. I am so very grateful too that we were given that private room as it was quieter and easier for me to calm him down and distract him from what was happening.
Eventually at 5.45pm it was my sons turn to go down to theatre. The nurse came and gave him a hospital gown to put on and took off the bandages and plastic dressings from his hands. We then walked to where the theatre was and the surgeon and anaesthetist from earlier were there to greet us.
The anaesthetist was very kind and tried extremely hard to put my son at ease by telling him the pillow was like a giant haribo and she tried a trick to distract him from the fact she was trying to put the cannula in his hand. Unfortunately this didn’t work so well and it hurt him going in. This caused him to get very upset because he had been told it wouldn’t hurt so the anaesthetist very quickly put the medication in to make him fall asleep. It wasn’t very nice to watch as he was so upset when he fell asleep but I had to then leave quite quickly to go and wait for him.
I used this time to get a much needed cup of tea and a sandwich because I too had not eaten since early this morning. I had not been able to leave my son long enough to eat and nor did I want to eat in front of him when he was so hungry but couldn’t eat.
After what seemed like ages but was actually 40 minutes, the surgeon came to see me to tell me everything had gone well and explain what he had done. 20 minutes later I was called to go to the recovery room where my son was waking up. He made me and the nurse caring for him laugh because he used his default greeting of “hi mum, how are you?” three times, read the entire nurses board on the wall in front of him out loud and told me all about how the blood pressure monitor worked while he was still a little woozy. He was even able to tell the nurse what room number he was in on the ward, something I couldn’t even remember.
When the nurse was happy he was wheeled back to his room where he moved into his bed. He was then given the remote control to the bed and a sandwich. He spent the next half an hour making the bed go up, down, forward and backwards and then ate the sandwich.
After he had eaten the nurse came back to take out his cannula, much to his (and my) relief as it was really starting to annoy him. I then helped him get dressed and we were allowed to leave the hospital.
All in all I was extremely impressed with the level of care and understanding my son was given whilst in hospital today. The staff were aware he was autistic and that he had sensory processing difficulties and they had listened to me about what he needed to be more comfortable. They all went out of their way to help him, to accommodate his needs and to patiently explain everything to him. I do feel that without this help we would have had an entirely different and much more stressful experience.
I was very worried before we went because of recent news stories about unfortunately worse experiences than ours and that is what made me ring the ward before we went. The nurses all told me I did the right thing because they were then prepared for my son and were able to put measures in place to help us.
Fortunately and thankfully it looks like my son is going to be ok and hopefully won’t need any more surgery in the near future. I am signing off now to get some sleep before the anaesthetic the surgeon injected into the wound wears off and I get woken up again!
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