holden's surgery

we spent yesterday morning at a branch of cincinnati children's hospital having holden's hypospadias repair surgery.  for those that aren't familiar, the short version is that hypospadias is when the pee-hole is not in the correct place of the penis.  carter actually had the same condition and has had the repair surgery twice (only because the first one came undone).  there are many varying degrees of hypospadias.  in the worst cases, the hole can be behind the testicles, which requires multiple surgeries to correct.  luckily both of my boys had very mild cases, where the hole was only misplaced by a fraction of an inch.  to correct this, it only requires an outpatient surgery (unless there is another factor, such as prematurity, which requires an overnight stay for observation after anesthesia, like carter had for his first surgery).

anyways, background aside, the surgery went great.  we opted to have the surgery at an outlying campus of cincinnati children's instead of the main campus simply because it's a little closer for us.  surgery was scheduled for 7:30 am, with us arriving at 6:30 am.  everything went so well, that we were on our way home at 10:30 am!  here is a picture of my little dude before surgery.

he woke up well from anesthesia, which is always a concern.  even with carter, he always woke up really crabby and was hard to control.  holden woke up great, which isn't so much of a surprise since he is a happy waker-upper anyways.  so far he has been doing great, just a little extra sleepy.  our main problem has been with the fact that he has diarrhea from being on antibiotics for weeks now trying to get rid of his stubborn ear infections.  this is a problem for obvious reasons.  we have already had to change the dressing around his penis multiple times and we weren't supposed to mess with it at all.  however, once it gets "dirty" it has to be done.  he has been great about taking all the medicines he has and hopefully they will help him heal quickly!

he has a stent in to keep the hole open while it heals, which means frequent diaper changes because he is always wet.  he will have that taken out next tuesday and then can resume normal activity.  in the meantime, he can't do any straddle toys, which means NO JUMPEROO :-/  and we can't even carry him on our hips, which presents another challenge trying to tote my 21+ pound dude around.  all in all, everything has gone great so far and we are hopeful his recovery will continue to go well and he will be back to normal in a week or so.