Our day

I have been taking way more pictures than usual lately because I have been so overjoyed to have a camera again. In that spirit, I decided to document this morning and afternoon (plus I realized that I have very few pictures of Abbie in the hospital, and we should have at least a few to show her when she gets older.)

Blogger will only let me attach 5 pictures to each post, so this will continue on to the next post.

Here's what happens when Abbie gets an MRI.

First, we get to the waiting room an hour early. They insist on our being there an hour before the scheduled MRI, and usually this means that after I've signed about a dozen papers we sit for an hour and a half. Today we were lucky, and after I signed some papers and Abbie played with the fancy sticker the nurse gave her (because she is so adorable), we only had to wait half an hour. Hooray!

Once we are in the back room, Abbie changes into a hospital gown. She began, when this all started, by wearing the peach ones, then graduated to the green ones. Now she is in a blue one, and I can't believe how big she is getting.

Abbie asks, "How many pictures are you going to take?"


She is weighed and measured and they ask me about five million questions and have me sign a few hundred pieces of paper.

Then we wait for about half an hour.

The nurses give her a toy because she is so adorable.
Then we wait for another half an hour.

Once we are good and settled in our little hospital cubicle, a nurse arrives to escort us to the anesthesiology room. Abbie is given sleeping-gas (she usually chooses the bubble-gum flavor) and she quickly falls deeply asleep. Today, she immediately began to snore which made us all laugh.

(I was too busy holding her to take pictures of this. Plus, those anesthesiologists are a nervous breed.)

Once Abbie was settled into the gurney, I ran to the cafeteria and downed a quick cup of coffee and then sat in the waiting room alternating between re-reading The Brothers Karamazov, peeking at the other people in the room, and dozing with my head in my hand.

Exactly two hours later and three minutes later, I was called back to sit with Abbie while she woke up.
When I first came into the recovery room, she looked like this:
I hate seeing her like that, and I only took the one picture.

After twenty minutes or so, she finally woke up. She was groggy and couldn't sit up straight, but she immediately began to pull on her nose tube. She hates the nose tube.

The nose tube was already out when the nurse came in, so she disconnected it and removed the blood pressure cuff and the glowing oxygen monitor, and then I was able to lift Abbie out of her bed and sit with her in my lap. She is heavier than she used to be!

We sat there for about half an hour, just rocking, and then the nurse brought Abbie a popsicle and some applejuice to check her swallowing. They won't let us leave until they are sure she can swallow, and once upon a time this was an ordeal. Abbie had so much applejuice during her two long hospitalizations that she refused to drink it for about a year afterwards. So when they would bring her the carton of applejuice after an MRI, she wanted nothing to do with it. But they wouldn't let us leave until she drank it. Chris once waited until the nurse wasn't looking, and drank it himself.

Today, though, Abbie slurped that juice down in under thirty seconds and reached for the popsicle.

She was extremely groggy, tired and dizzy. But it was 1:00 in the afternoon, and man was she hungry.


She devoured that popsicle before she even knew where she was.
The nurse gave her another toy because she was so adorable.

Cont'd in next post!