well, today was the big day for inguinal hernia surgery! the whole process went very smoothly; we stopped feeding odin at 1 a.m. ( i think from his perspective not eating was probably the most traumatic part of the entire day ) and at 7:30 a.m. we took him to the hospital to be admitted and prepped for surgery. at 9 a.m. he was wisked away for the surgery ( despite numorous attempts on my part, i couldn’t convince anyone to let me watch the procedure ), which only took about an hour.

after being wheeled into the operating room they administered a general anesthetic and put him back on the ventilator. during the surgery, they made two small incisions near his groin which allowed them to close the openings in his abdomen which were causing the hernias. near the end of the surgery, odin was given a shot near the base of his spine known as a caudal block which is a form of postoperative analgesia. thanks to the effects of the caudal block, odin only needed occasional does of tylenol to help manage post-op pain.

soon after he was out of the operating room, they brought us into the post-op room so that we could be with him as he woke up. it took about a half an hour for the general anesthetic to wear off and he required an oxygen mask to help him to maintain his blood oxygen levels, since the lingering amounts of general anesthetic left in his system would occasionally cause him to forget to breathe, which is quite normal.

odin stayed in post-op for about an hour and was then wheeled off to his own private pediatric room. after about 5 hours he let us know that he was quite tired of only getting intravenous fluids and he started guzzling bottles. amazingly he didn’t seem to have any nausea and was able to keep down his normal 45 cc bottles, which is a great sign that he’s going to recover quickly and not
have his “reserve capacity” wiped out like he did after his ROP surgery!

he’ll stay in the hospital overnight just to make sure that he doesn’t develop any complications and to give him plently of time for the lingering effects of the general anesthetic to wear off and if everything goes as planned he should be released early tommorrow morning.

it’s amazing to think that with a little luck, maybe – just maybe – little odin won’t ever need to see the inside of another operating room again and we can finally close this chapter of his story and move on to day after boring day of sleeping, feeding and growing.