I woke up this morning and gasped when the clock said 5:03 a.m. We were running late. Greg and I had somehow each set our respective alarm clocks for 4:15 p.m. Two alarm clocks. Two night stands. Two people each setting his or her own alarm independent of the other person. I have no idea what the odds are that we would both make the same mistake.
We still managed to scoop Sam out of bed and plop him into the car and get to the hospital by our appointed time at 6:00am. Sam had surgery for congenital trigger thumbs this morning. (There is a good diagram here that shows how a nodule in the tendon causes the problem.) It's something I first noticed way before he could even talk. His thumb would occasionally stick in a bent position and he would have to pop it back with his other hand. About two months ago I realized that he couldn't bend his right thumb at all at the first knuckle. Thinking back, I realized it had been this way for probably at least a year. In addition, his left thumb, instead of catching just occasionally, now stuck every single time he bent it. He had begun bending his thumb and popping it out with the index finger on the same hand as a sortof absent-minded habit.
So surgery it was. From what I understand, in the medical hand-world this surgery is pretty routine. Like getting your tonsils out, I guess. Only it's more common in folks older than Sam who've had some sort of injury. The nurse who did our pre-registration thought Sam would be impressed to know that Waylon Jennings himself had the same surgery. Sam wasn't impressed.
The best part of every story about surgery on a child is the part where they drink what the nurses call "the silly juice." I forget what it is, but it makes them all woozy and they pretty much don't care what you do at that point. It's a shame we didn't video Sam on the silly juice because he was very entertaining. He was seeing double and watched me and my extra self-"that other one"- for a long time with interest. When I waved one hand through the air Sam smiled wanly and said, "Whoa. That was freaky." in his best stoner voice. He spent five minutes wiggling his fingers in front of his face watching the "yes" they'd written on his thumb with sharpie move around. He was really enjoying himself. At one point he grinned at Greg and slowly drawled, "This stuff is awesome." I'm grateful that he doesn't remember how much fun he was having, otherwise I'm pretty sure he'd be asking to do it again. Perhaps this doesn't bode well for his high school years.
The procedure was quick, but he took a long time to wake up in recovery. After an unbearable number of Spongebob episodes, we were finally able to come home and Sam, with a little help from Tylenol with Codeine, is doing most of the things he normally does as long as it doesn't involve using his hands or getting them wet. He's annoyed at his bandages and declared that we should have only done one hand. I told Sam that they did both hands at once so he wouldn't have to go through all this again. He said he would have been okay with just fixing the thumb that couldn't bend. He could have lived with the other thumb; it was worse having both hands out of commission.
As I accompanied him to the bathroom this evening to help him do those things you need hands for in the bathroom, I realized that he actually had a pretty good point.
