Two days ago my daughter Kaitlyn underwent surgery on her eyes to correct her congenital esotropia (lazy eye). This was the second surgery for her, the first occuring when she was only six months old (she’s three now). We drove up to Portland Wednesday afternoon, had dinner with our good friends Justin and Raegan, and had the surgery Thursday at Casey Eye Institute.
Turned out to be an even worse day than we’d imagined; Kaitlyn had a pre-op appointment at 11:00, to be followed (we thought) by surgery at approximately 12 noon. Unfortunately, the appointment ran long, and the doctor told us the surgery would be around 1:30 or 2:00, as a baby was in surgery ahead of us.
Well, it wasn’t 1:30, and it wasn’t 2:00 either. We got bumped again, and finally Kaitlyn went into surgery right about 3:00. At that point, we had been pretty much led to believe that we’d be getting into surgery between 2:00 and 2:30, because they let us bring Kaitlyn back at about 1:30 for an oral sedative to calm her down, which she needed because she was completely freaked out about the whole deal. So, from about 1:30 to 3:00, I held Kaitlyn (who was groggy with sedative, but fighting it), waiting for surgery to start and desperately hoping it would be soon so we could get the hell out of there.
The thing is, we were apparently originally on the schedule for a 2:30 surgery to begin with, but nobody told us that— we were led to believe she’d go into surgery around noon right after her pre-op. No one told us otherwise, until after we got there and checked in for surgery. And since patients can’t have any food for six hour prior to surgery, we had to get Kaitlyn up to have a light breakfast at 5:30 that morning. So when they finally took her in, she’d been without food for 9 hours.
She’s doing fine now, and her eyes are red but straight. It’s amazing how fast kids bounce back from something like this. Still, I’m not happy with the runaround on the day of surgery. If they schedule us at 2:30, fine. If a young baby has priority over us, fine. But nobody told us until it was too late. That’s what burns me up. We were there jumping through the hoops they laid out for us, but they didn’t even have their shit together enough to tell us what was going on.
Enough venting. Kaitlyn is good, things are good and the whole ordeal is behind us.