Today I had the most stressful few hours of my life
Using a throwaway because this is an obscenely identifiable story.
My kid just turned 1. He was born with fibular hememilia, which means one of his legs and that foot didn't develop properly. Not genetic, no particular cause, nothing else wrong, just "one in ten thousand". Fortunately he has his knee, so once he gets a prosthesis he'll be running around like any kid. He was not a good candidate for reconstructive surgery.
As part of getting a prosthesis, his leg needs to be prepped. That means amputating the "foot", cutting the bone and straightening it, moving the soft tissue from his heel to the end of the bone, etc. The idea being to create a stump that is optimally shaped for a prosthetic. Major major surgery.
They waited til after he turned 1 to do the surgery, because risks associated with anasthesia go way down after 12 months. That happened Monday. We live in a rural area, the (really excellent) orthopedic pediatric hospital is 3.5 hours away from us. We drove there Sunday, surgery was Monday morning, Monday afternoon and Tuesday were pain management, and we were home Wednesday with as happy a kiddo as a 12 month old who just had their foot cut off can be. He's in a wrapped splint (since they cut the bone and put pins in to straighten it) that we occasionally have to change the wrap on with a diaper and annoyed he can't crawl everywhere but otherwise doing great.
Today is four days post surgery. Our pediatrician's office wants to see us so that they can do a post-hospital debrief and make sure they're up to speed on his status, his pain meds, etc. We go in, we're in the room with the nurse after all the measurements waiting for the doctor to be ready, kid is on mom's lap happily babbling and waving his limbs.
He waves the injured leg and the splint that is supposed to be protecting his surgical wound and cut tibia flies off and clatters to the floor. We all start flipping out that his surgical wound is now exposed to the air and there's no support for his bone.
The doctor comes in, says she might be able to slip it back on, and tries. It does not get on all the way, kid is screaming bloody murder because we're pushing his injured, healing leg all over down this tube. Splint does not go back on. We call the hospital. The surgeon who did the surgery gets on the phone after some searching by hospital staff, and she gives us some instructions on how to get it on. We try, same result as before- kid is screaming in obvious pain, and it's not going on properly. We wind up nearly disassembling the whole splint, pulling out all the cotton padding, down to the bare plaster "U" shape. There just so happened to be someone working in the pediatrician's urgent care who used to work at an orthopedic center and had done similar things before, so he came up to help. Maybe an hour has gone by at this point of us having to manually immobilize his leg while also making sure he doesn't touch the healing cuts. They are able to get the plaster splint back on, wrap it back up in gauze and medical cloth, rewrap with ace bandages, and add in some fiberglass cast tape to make a little hook so the wrap around his waist can hold it up a bit more.
So now we're back home, everyone is fine, but that was traumatizing. The kid had a bunch of extra pushing and pulling on his barely healing surgical wound, mom and I had to keep him calm enough to get the splint back on all while he's in pain while we also help keep the leg as immobilized as we can, while we watch the doctor try and fail the first couple attempts to get it back on, where the alternative is a surprise near-4-hour car ride back to the hospital with a 12 month old with leg in multiple pieces and no proper cast. We might still need to do that if it comes off again but for now we are home and playing and reading to him and he seems none the worse for it.
I'm the most stressed I've ever been. My legs were literally shaking so badly after we got it back on that I had to sit down before I fell over, which I thought was just a figure of speech before. I'm immensely thankful that of all the places for the thing to fall off, we were literally inside the pediatrician's office.
If it comes off again we'll have to go to the hospital and they'll replace the splint with a full cast, which will also need to wrap his hips and immobilize him much more than he already is. Hopefully that doesn't happen. At least we now have an idea of how to get the splint back on so we wouldn't need to be literally holding his leg together for 3.5 hours in the car.
It's been 6 hours since we got back home and my heart rate still hasn't returned to normal. I don't normally post kid stuff here, I just needed somewhere to get all this out of my head.