Today is the day we get to change Cole’s dressing from his surgery! I say that as if I’m excited about it, but the truth is I’m scared to death about it. I don’t want to hurt him, I know he’s going to hate it, and I’m terrified to see my baby’s back with a huge incision. I first contacted the surgeons nurse to get all the details. They had given me 2 AG pads and tagerderm for over the pads. Hindsight, I wish I had checked his back because it turns out they didn’t give us enough supplies. You would think they knew how long of an incision they made to ensure their patients had enough, but that’s not how it worked. I delayed the changing of the dressing until the very last second, while Cole’s nurse was still here.
We had it all planned out. The nurse and I were going to roll Cole over, take his brace off, and Mark would take off the old dressing and put the new dressing on. Well, that worked for approximately 5 seconds before Cole used all his strength to fight against the nurse and myself and roll back over. We decided on a plan B, to put him on his tummy, that worked for less than 5 seconds before he completely lifted himself up on all fours. Here comes plan C, to sit him up and hold his shoulders and his hips (allowing his feet to dangle off the bed) to ensure he didn’t have the leverage needed to stand up and giving Mark the room he needed to change out the dressing.
This may have been one of the hardest things I’ve had to do without bawling my eyes out. Cole is so strong and was fighting every second, thrashing around, crying so hard, and I felt horrible restraining him but knew that’s what needed to be done. I was nervous he was jerking around so much, he was risking making the rods shift out of place and was doing harm to himself. No matter what I did, he wanted to be let go and wanted us to stop and he was going to fight until we did just that.
Mark is incredible at all of this stuff and he never ceases to amaze me with his patience and diligence in being able to successfully completing a task, better than most, with little to no experience. Mark managed to get all the tagerderm off which is equivalent to the stickiness of duct tape and the pads over Cole’s incision removed. He put the new pads on which only covered a third of the incision and the tagerderm over that. He utilized tagerderm over the incision that didn’t have the pad. Once this was complete, Cole immediately went to sleep. We wore him out completely and in seconds he was in a deep sleep. We ended up having to go to CVS and pick up medical supplies since we weren’t given enough and yes.. As soon as Mark got home we had to do this all over again to Cole, only this time it was much quicker.
All in all, this was a rough day for all of us. Luckily for us, Cole doesn’t hold a grudge, he’s forgiving, and he’ll be laughing and joking with us as soon as he wakes up from his nap.
