Getting the Spica

Our appointment like all of Mackenzie's specialist appointments was in Edmonton and we were scheduled first. We woke up at 3:20am to get ready, feed Mackenzie one last time and drive to Edmonton to be at the hospital for 6:00am.

Once we were registered and waiting with all the other babies that needed various treatments it started to hit home. We were called into a room where they prepped Mackenzie for her procedure of dye in the hip and possibly a tenotomy. They gave her some tylenol and placed numbing cream on a hand and foot where they would be inserting the intravenous. One benefit was is that she got to wear these super cut way too big prison looking hospital pyjamas!

Shortly after we were taken to speak with the anathesiologist. She was very nice and calm, I am sure this is by design, as it helped us immensely. She notified us that one of us could go in with Mackenzie while she went to sleep if we thought that she might have some separation anxiety or wouldn't want to go with the nurses.  After she left we waited for another few minutes before the nurses came to take Mackenzie to the operating room. They apparently were not told that one of us could go in. They asked for Mackenzie and played with her a bit (Mackenzie seemed to like them) and told us they were leaving with her (we decided this was probably best in the end). So there we were, sans our baby. What to do? Like all good Canadians we went to get a Tim Horton's coffee and bagel.

The wait surpassingly didn't seem that bad. Having confidence in your health team makes that much easier. Besides that our Doctor doesn't like to talk very much, everyone involved has been the professionals they are trained to be. While waiting they gave us a little buzzer/ringer like you get at the restaurant while waiting for your table. It would notify us when Mackenzie had woken up and we could see her. That took about an hour and half.

We could hear Mackenzie before we could see her. She was not a happy camper. Besides the drugs having a negative effect on her temper she was starving as she hadn't eaten since 4 am and it was now about 9:30.  She apparently refused the sugar water that the nurses tried to give her in recovery.  Breastfeeding became a non option when she continued to bite out of frustration, which is not something she normally does. This was really difficult for me (Lindsay).  Not only was my baby in a cast from her armpits to her ankles, I wasn't able to calm her down.  I broke down in that moment and cried along with her.  We had a brought a couple bottles for this very possibility, so we set to work warming them up and she drank from the bottle with no problems.

Soon enough she was calmed down and we were left to ponder her new accessory. It was big, covered more of her torso than we had expected, and was very unwieldy when trying to hold her.  No one really seemed to know what we should be doing, or was telling us how we should now care for our child.  The nurses in the Day Ward did not seem overly familiar with the cast and kept asking us questions.   Calls were put in for someone from the plaster room to come and finish "petaling" the cast, as well as someone from Occupational Therapy to come and go through things with us.  This resulted a lot of waiting around for people to show up and extreme frustration on our part.

Waiting around to see what comes next

Once we got Mackenzie settled down and had a few snuggles we could see that she was extremely exhausted so we laid her down on the hospital bed to have a nap while we waited around.  A nurse kept coming in to make small talk, then the woman from the plaster room arrived and told us the cast was still too wet to petal but she would show us how.  She then proceeded to demonstrate on our sleeping child, thus waking her up, but leaving us with the tape to do ourselves later.

Shortly after noon an occupational therapist came by.  She went through with us how to care for Mackenzie in her cast the best she could: briefly explained diapering, that we needed to change her position frequently, how to care for the cast, Mackenzie's skin, etc.  She looked at our carseat and we figured it would not work for us, so she sent for a Hippo car seat to be brought up.  We used a bunch of foam in the seat as Mackenzie was to small for her legs to straddle the seat but I really did not think that it seemed safe at all.  We went back to our own carseat, again with a lot of foam behind Mackenzie to make her flat in the seat, and finally decided this would be the best option.  Really, it was either that, or no seat at all.  We just needed to finish up the paperwork, pedaling the cast, nurse her one more time and then we could be on our way home.

Brice pedaling Mackenzie's cast

Most of the staff kept commenting to us how great it was to see Mackenzie in such good spirits.  We were told many times that most kids would not stop crying and were very upset for the entire time they were in the hospital after getting a spica cast.  She honestly seemed to be pretty much like her regular self except perhaps a little more on the fussy side as she still worked through the aftermath of the anesthesia.   It helped us a lot

I think we finally left the hospital around 2 pm and started our 2 hour drive home.  Mackenzie was exhausted from the day so mostly slept in the car.  I rode in the back seat with her to try to calm her down when she would wake up and cry.

In the car seat driving home