Where do I begin?
We love Drew. I mean, how could you not adore a kid that has such zest for life and such a sweet heart? He has had such a brave attitude over these last few months which has not been too fun for him.
So we all remember this picture, right? I guess this is where it begins.
We started this(not too fun journey) memorial day weekend with a non-colored lump. {Lindsey's inner dialogue will now be in italics as you read the rest of this post}
I felt like I wanted throw up after noticing this lump especially with Drew being on the middle landing of our stairs and me sitting at the dinning room table 15 feet away. Seemed to be a swollen lymph node, but after going to the pediatrician and 4 different antibiotics, it continued to swell, grow, turn red, and then to a purple(and very sore) stage. The suspicion was a secondary infection of some sort, possibly staff or strep,
These are not pretty words to parents, but when antibiotics did not work, an ear nose and throat specialist was recommended. I am not going to get into my dislike for the first specialist we saw at first, because there is nothing good that will come of it now, but I will do everyone the favor if they are reading this to name names. Do not ever take your child(or even yourself if you have control over it) to Dr. Quenelle. He might have practiced for a 100 years, but read that again...100 years.
So I guess he was a great doctor back in 1915, but today he is not. You get the picture, yes? On the third visit with Dr. Quenelle, the decision was made to drain what was now a potentially dangerous abscess in the office while Drew was awake. So, yay, kind of like awake surgery.
I still to this day, regret this decision that I feel was ill advised by Dr. Quenelle(who will now be referred to as Dr. Evil), and get emotional every time I think about it again. This type of procedure is done on kids 7 years and older I find out after, and NO 3 year old would ever hold still and cooperate with what was done to him. I feel my blood pressure and food in my stomach rising as I write thisHere we are after the "awake surgery" as I like to call it. I never did get a picture right after, probably due to my devastation of what I just witnessed, but we moved forward, hoping and praying this would take care of the infection.
So then we move into a time called operation CHANGE-CLEAN-WOUND area for Drew.
Never in a million years did I think removing a band aid would be so horrific...seriously , ask my husband because I am not being a wimp right now We were told by doctor evil that we needed to keep that wound open at all costs to drain, even if that meant inserting a Q-tip,
are you flipping kidding me right now? wiping and scrubbing hard enough to break open any starting of a scab, and even squeezing if there appeared to be puss or left overs from the abscess.
SCREAMING SCREAMING SCREAMING We did each day until our next appt, which always turned out to be a Wednesday
and now Wednesdays are an awful day of the week in my bookSo after 5 days, this is what it looked like. Swelling down, but still red. The minimal information we were told by Dr. Evil, and our own research was that after and abscess is drained, it will heal and go away in 3-5 days. hmmmmm.
So realizing that this is not resolving and there is more to this story.
We will not go back to Dr. Evil We switch to another doctor in the same office kind of awkward, but who cares at this point, because we want a second opinion. Blood work is done(finally) and things like Cat Scratch and other strange issues are ruled out. So we continue to watch it. We watch, and DREAD cleaning it because it is so awful for Drew. We watch it more, and still the oozing and the soreness persists. During this time I would like to say that my sweet Drew is now a worried 3 year old.
2 words that should not go together. worried and 3 year old, right? When I would go to get him in the morning after a restful nights sleep, the first thing out of his mouth, as his bottom lip is quivering and his voice is cracking from trying to hold back tears is "mommy....you don;t change my band aide today. okay mommy? mommy you change my band aide in 18 minutes. okay mommy?"
wanted to roll into a ditch and puke.
Close to 2 weeks after procedure
So after all this time passing and this abscess and infection not subsiding, surgery was the only option we had left. But real, normal, going under general anesthetic surgery. I had promised Drew, I would not "let them use the machine" or get shots ever again on his neck. That is just one heartbreaking memory he took away from the abscess draining procedure.
Right before surgery...obviously still infected.
Then it was surgery day. Drew was in high spirits thinking he was going to the doctors with promises of no shots(that he would remember) Thanks to Todd's new ipod touch and star wars games..all was well in Drew's world that morning.
This picture was just so incredibly sad to me. This was minutes before going to the operating room, and the nurse had given him a medicine called tripdephene(sp) which basically makes you forget everything that's about to happen. Answering simple questions were hard for Drew to do and he just was simply drugged. That stuff was some seriously powerful stuff, because it was within minutes and our little Drew was not there anymore.
Let me just say that I am glad Drew does not remember Todd and I at that point because we were not the pillar of strength we should have been. I was the same EXACT way with his other surgery when he was 6 months old. I am strong and cheery right up to that very point when the nurse takes him to walk back to the operating room with out us.
Here is what it looked like just a couple days after surgery. Dr. Zechowy did stitches on the inside and then a special skin glue on the surface.
He did great in surgery and the doctor said he "took more out" than he orginially thought he would need to. He removed the entire lymph node, along with the infected tissue around it. After the pathology report came back, it was called a non-caseating granuloma, that had a rare bacteria present that the doctor has not seen "for years"
So my kid is special you see...because he gets rare bacteria to enter his body..what a nice host he is I am not going to get into all the details, but just be thankful for our healthy Drew now. I am also thankful for all the friends and family that checked in with us and were supporting us through this whole scary and anxiety ridden time. You know who you are . :)
I am sure I am forgetting things,
or blocking out things but we are back to normal around here. I do seem to be a little sensitive to if I see anything abnormal on my kids
body even a normal bump or bruise, but wouldn't you be, if you were me? Drew still really does not like us getting near his neck AT ALL, and hair cuts are pretty tramatic, but he is still understandably sensitive. He still randomly asks if we have to do warm compresses on his neck, or if we are going to "wipe"
read break open scab and try to manually drain more puss his neck and I can happily say,
"No we are not Drew."
