Surgery
I was driving down the road on my way to the parking lot when this handsome man walked up alongside my car and let himself in. It was my wonderful husband! He got off work an hour early and surprised me. He had been walking up and down the sidewalk waiting for me to drive by. I was so relieved that I didn’t have to do this with baby alone.
Baby was a little bit more fussy than usual. She was fine until the casts came off. She is an old hat at casting and knew we never take them off without stretching her legs and feet into new ones. Maybe that’s why she was so fussy; she kept waiting for us to cast her. We went into another room where we waited for a while. She just got fussier and fussier. Charley walked her up and down the hall and threw her up in the air. She just stared up at him with these sad little eyes.
Her feet are looking better than they ever have before! They don’t move, though, and the toes are curled in, but they now turn out exposing a part of the ankle where the tendon surgery could take place. She started crying as we were leaving the room. There was someone walking in front of me leading us to the waiting room and I wanted to run her down. (Go faster or let me run back!) Some other baby was screaming in a room next to where we waited, so while we didn’t hear much of our baby’s cries, that other baby made the waiting torturous.
Now the ankles are a bit more straight. They stink like blood though and I hate that. Some of the blood actually seeped through the gauze and through the cast itself. Can’t get that off for three weeks. When the casts dry a little better, I’m going to try to cover it with white crayon. It makes me feel aweful looking at it.
It took almost an hour to get home in traffic because of an accident. She was in the back seat with a dirty diaper. We finally got her home and changed and the plaster washed off her. She breastfed for over an hour and cuddled while fussing. Charley started kissing her face while she fussed and that kept her quiet. He announced, “I’m kissing another girl in here!” while I was in the kitchen. 
She’s asleep now and I’ll give her some baby Tylenol when she wakes up. She is fussing in her sleep too. All in all I expected it to be worse and it wasn’t so bad. I noticed when the heavy casts were off that her hips wiggled a lot more. Her legs don’t have a lot of mass to them, but I’m hoping they might firm up once she can move them again. I’m not making predictions on them yet since she’s been in casts most of her life, but I had hoped they would feel differently. Oh, I love her so much and I hope this is all worth it.
