One handed, left-handed Juggling

Pain sucks.

Seeing your baby in honest pain really sucks. Not fussiness or fall down and bump your head pain, but rock your world, everything hurts PAIN.

Not knowing what to do about it and not being able to use the gold standard answer is like juggling one handed, left-handed. You want to use your other hand to make things easier, but you can’t.

Ellie has had an adverse reaction to morphine in the past (scary low heart rates, low respiration, etc) so we are at a considerable disadvantage in the pain management department. She can have it but we need watch her very, very carefully. Most babies come out of anesthesia and are given a dose of morphine to send them on their way for the first few days post-op. It works as a pain killer and a sedative, letting the baby sleep soundly while their body recovers from the shock of having their belly opened up, their guts emptied, moved around cut and sewn together.

Ellie can’t ride the morphine wave so the pros have to get creative. Tonight we had to see Ellie in honest pain for the first time in a long while tonight after she came upstairs from the recovery room. On the handy little baby pain measurement card that the nurses carry with them, she was off the charts and we couldn’t figure out why or how to stop it.

A little of this, a little of that and she is good for 10 minutes, just long enough for us to believe that she is comfortable and that we could take a deep breath. Then it ramps up again and we scramble to adjust.

A long night. And I remember the times that I felt lucky over the past few months that my baby wasn’t the one down the hall screaming in pain. Now she is that kid.

A little bit of morphine would be nice right now.