If the stones had been small enough, they might have passed through the duct and out of the body through the intestines like regular waste does. However, because of their large size and irregular shape these were unable to pass and had to be removed during a surgical procedure. This procedure was a fairly simple one with a very long complicated name: Endoscopic Retrograde Cholangiopancreatography (ERCP, for short).
The procedure itself involved sedating Robin with general anesthesia and then inserting a tube with a camera attached to its end into her mouth, down her esophagus, into her stomach, then into the duodenum, the gateway to the small intestine. A catheter was then inserted into the duct leading to the pancreas and gallbladder. Once the stones were located, the surgeon scooped them out with an instrument called a basket and removed them from her body. The stones were large enough that Robin is now somewhat of a celebrity among the gastrointestinal surgeons. (I guess everyone really does get their 15 minutes of fame at some point.) Photos were taken during the procedure, too, and we were given a sampling of those in full color. Not really anything you would want to add to the baby book, I don't think, but interesting to look at and quite remarkable to some of the medical personnel.
Now that the escapee stones have been removed, Robin is scheduled for a second surgery on Monday to remove her gallbladder. That surgery is expected to be routine and will be done laparoscopically, meaning very small cuts will be made in her abdomen and a laparoscopic scope and surgical instruments will be inserted to clip the gallbladder out and remove it from her body.
I gave all that background to set the tone for the comments I feel it necessary to make about our hospital experience. I have never had to spend an extended period of time in the hospital with one of my children. I was in the hospital for about a week some time ago with my own health issues, but that was different. All the procedures, all the communication, all the interaction with the staff and other patients was because of me and my medical issues during that previous stay. It definitely makes a diference in how you experience the events related to the hospital stay if it's your kid who is the cause for the procedures, communications and interactions.
I can deal with my own pain. It's scary to be in pain and to not know if the doctor is going to be able to figure out what's wrong with you or if he can answer the question of whether you're ever going to feel better again. However, it's a thousand times worse if it's your child who's in pain and those same questions are roiling around in your brain. You try to push them away, you try to ignore them, but when you hear your baby cry in fear or see her grimace in pain or hear her moan in agony, those questions will not be answered quite to your satisfaction, and you will not be comforted with simply a pat on the back and a kind word. Those questions seep into the very fiber of your being and haunt you...no matter how strong your faith is. You become a slave to the morphine that the nurses give to ease your child's pain every bit as much as the child does.
And, hospitals are not for the faint of heart in other respects, too. When Robin and her daddy and Grandma arrived at the hospital, after a harrowing ride downtown with Grandma driving and Daddy in charge of the vomit bucket, they were greeted in the emergency room waiting area with a veritable sea of other folks who were living their own versions of the sick child drama. The awareness of fear and worry are palpable in this area and have a cloying, disagreeable scent all their own, one that's sharper than any disinfectant and more challenging to dispel than any bacteria.
I had the opportunity to experience it, too, when I rushed in to meet Robin et al in the emergency room later, arriving there immediately after my 16 hour shift at work. I was aghast at the sheer number of people who were sitting, reclining, standing and otherwise occupying just the waiting room area of the emergency room. I was even more appalled to find that although many of these individuals did indeed have sick children, not all the children were really ill enough to require emergency care. It seems that the healthcare system in the United States is so broken that those who cannot afford regular preventative healthcare either use the emergency room personnel as their means of treating commonplace illnesses like colds or tummyaches or they wait until their child is so ill that the emergency room is their only option for treatment.
Surely, I cannot be the only one who thinks this way! It just seems to make sense that there's got to be a better way. There's got to be a way to treat those who are not critically ill but cannot afford insurance or regular healthcare, without their having to resort to crowding into the emergency room of their local hospital and slowing down the service necessary to those who are experiencing truly emergent conditions. I shudder to think what would have happened if Robin's illness had been life threatening. As it was, she was in more pain than any person big or little should have to endure. I just cannot imagine what would have happened if she had been having trouble breathing or staying conscious. I would like to think that we would have been moved to the top of the list and would not have had to wait almost five hours to be seen and given morphine induced pain relief, but I just don't know.
Another unpleasant aspect of hospital care is unsympathetic staff who seem determined to make a very stressful time in a family's life even more stressful and horrible than it already is. Although the majority of the doctors and nurses with whom we interacted were perfectly pleasant, compassionate, friendly and warm individuals, there was that one nurse who made Nurse Ratchett seem like the Easter Bunny. It was she who had the unmitigated gall to tell Robin that "Hospitals were not made to just lie around in. They are for people to get better in."
Wow, Toots. Thanks ever so much for those earth shattering pearls of wisdom. A day after surgery and you're all ready for my kid to jump out of bed, yank the morphine IV out of her arm on her own and run around the hospital like she's entered into the Boston Marathon, are you? You do realize, do you not, that each person is different from every other person? We each have our own physiology, our own morphology that makes us unique. A byproduct of this uniqueness is that we each require our own amount of time to recover enough to function normally. Or, did you miss that lecture in your drunken nursing school days? Out for a little toot that day, were you?
Perhaps you also missed the lecture that consisted of someone older and and much wiser than you explaining to the class that YOU ARE NOT A DOCTOR. You simply do not have the medical knowledge or experience to tell me or my child that you're just going to order up some simethicone for what you believe to be gas pains instead of administering the morphine that the DOCTOR ordered be given in 3 mg increments EVERY THREE HOURS and not whenever you jolly well felt like it. So, you can stand there in all of your 12-year-old arrogance and make your happy pronouncements, but don't expect me to give a tinker's damn about anything you say. Actions speak louder than words, Toots. Bring the child more morphine now and while you're out there, check your abominable attitude at the door.
Ahem. I digress into a temper tantrum by blog because to do so in front of my child and in front of the hospital staff would probably not have had the desired effect. Robin is rather sensitive to my moods and often misinterprets when my words of frustration and anger come bubbling forth. She sometimes thinks that I'm angry with her when, in reality, nothing could be further from the truth. She is my heart and the very best of me, as is her brother. Suffice it to say, that this experience has been one of the most nerve wracking, thought provoking, frustrationally challenging experiences of my life, made doubly so by a mean nurse, a broken healthcare system and truly gross hospital cafeteria food.
And, oh, they don't have coffee in this hospital that doesn't require a fifteen minute trek through the bowels of hell or the seas of humanity to retrieve.
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