ER

There should be some sort of "frequent flyer" awards for hospital visits (though Valerie and Judd wouldn't know what to do with all their awards!).

Mark and I went to Good Friday service at church this afternoon. After a few errands were run, we returned home to relieve my mom from "Oma duty." She was in the process of feeding Micah and lifted him up to burp him and was wondering why her shirt was wet (thinking he had spit up). But I looked at him and realized the problem: HIS BUTTON WAS OFF! The entire contents of his stomach had spilled out and there was his Mic-Key button laying on his tummy and an open hole in his belly. Yikes!

The frantic search for the answer to, "Where do we go?" began next. Micah's pediatrician said that normally she would send us to the ER, but because Micah was so little and his button was still pretty new, we should call the surgeons in Milwaukee to see if we needed to bring him down there. The office was closed (Good Friday?), and the voicemail gave another number to call to have a surgeon paged. The answering service told me she would page a surgeon. A half hour later, still no call. So we called the pediatrician back and she suggested we just go to the ER here.

We were asked by the triage nurse whether we had an extra button stored there in the ER for such an event. Um, no, were we supposed to? "Did you bring an extra button with you?" Um, no, are we supposed to have one? She took the button that had come out up to a surgeon to check the balloon for leaks. They determined that it was still good so it could be put back in. Yuck. Back we go to an ER room.

The doctor tried to get it back in and was not able to do so. He called a surgeon down to put it in. He also struggled. So he went upstairs to get some instruments to basically open the hole a bit wider so that he could get the tube in. That didn't work either. Imagine the screaming level at this point. He tried one last thing (used forceps) and it worked. If that hadn't worked, we would have had to go to Milwaukee and knock him out again.

The surgeons in Milwaukee still haven't called us back following our page at 3:30. Nice, huh? Dr. O is going to receive a not-so-nice phone call from me that he will hopefully share with his entire staff. I'm sure it was a resident who was supposed to answer the page. But still... We would have been at the ER almost an hour sooner (we waited at home for the surgeons to call us before we went to the ER) and that might have made it easier to get the button back in. And furthermore, was it surgery's reponsibility to have told us ahead of time what to do if his button came out? And maybe they should have given us an extra button?

Micah finally ate at 7:00pm. The last time he had anything that STAYED in his stomach was at 11:30 this morning. But he's resting comfortably right now. He didn't sleep at all while we were out. I don't imagine he'll wake up anytime soon. It's been a long afternoon/evening. I'm off to feed him now. I'm not going to stress him out and wake him up to see if he'll take anything orally. I'm just going to tube it. I can't wait for this drama to be done.