Hello everybody,

Wow. What a weekend so far. As most of you know, Hazel had surgery yesterday to get tubes put in her ears and have her tear ducts unblocked. What was supposed to be a simple in-and-out procedure turned into an overnight stay at the hospital.

When she had the surgery done, all was well. It turned out that her tear ducts weren't actually blocked - they just didn't curve at the bottom. (Did you know your tear ducts curve? lol...) So they added the curve to the tear ducts and all was well. Her ears were, as we knew, quite infected and a lot of purulent goo came out of her ears when they did the surgery, but the surgery went fine, tubes were in place. She had a little cough going in but the anesthesiologist listened to her chest and said she sounded great, so they went ahead with the surgery. Nobody anticipated what was going to happen next.

During the surgery, they discovered that Hazel has reflexive airway disease. Basically, it's a really fancy term stating that Hazel's trachea and esophagus are hypersensitive to anything foreign being introduced to her airway (like a breathing tube.) It caused her to have a bronchiospasm and her oxygen saturation levels went down. She had the symptoms of a partially collapsed lung - it didn't actually collapse but it had the signs of collapsing, which made the doctors a little nervous. They got her sats back up but noticed that the tubes were just covered in thick mucosy goo from her lungs and it seemed that the goo was neverending.

So what happened was they kept her in recovery for a bit longer and all was well. She came back to her room on the surgical unit and she was great. Sleep, kinda drunk-looking, a little bloody from the surgery, quite cuddly, but overall doing great. Her oxygen was great. Until she fell asleep and her oxygen levels dipped down. When she woke up and coughed, her levels went back up, but the minute she'd fall asleep down they'd go again into the 80s, which is not great for a little baby.

So after many pokes and proddings and many visits by just about everyone you can think of, the decision was made to admit Hazel to the pediatric unit overnight for observation and some nebulizer treatments to assist her with the breathing.

Hazel, throughout all of this, was dopey (from the anesthesia) and smiley and her usual happy self, giving lots and lots of love to everyone she saw, except the thermometer nurses.... lol... so after she was admitted to the peds unit, she did all right and throughout the night, her levels just kept steadily improving. She got off her IV late in the evening last night - mostly because that little monkey figured out how to disconnect herself, which caused momentary panic when I picked her up and found copious amounts of blood everywhere, but also because she was drinking enough fluids that she didn't need it any more.

Ezra and I both spent the night at the hospital - we were exhausted, having been up since 5am yesterday morning, and we did manage to get a little sleep but those hospital beds were not made for healthy people, let me tell you!

This morning, she was looked at again and since her levels were good, she was eating and drinking and playing, the decision was made to let her come home, which made her and us very very happy. :) So we are all home now and Moonbaby Hazel is sleeping like an angel.

Thank you to everyone for your thoughts and prayers and good wishes!

love,
ezra, tamara and HAZEL!