Surgery, and A Day Back At School

It’s been nearly a year since I’ve updated the blog but guess where I am back – the doctor.

This time, it’s the hospital, for an opportunity for C to get his adenoids removed. C has snored his whole life. He’s always hacking, picking his nose, reading or doing Legos or watching movies with his mouth wide open. When we took him to an ENT in April over spring break, after waiting a criminal 90 minutes in the waiting room, C was treated to the “nose noodle” and we learned that his adenoids were huge and obstructing his breathing and I was like, begging the doctor to take them out right then and there.

But now that C is suited up in too-adorable-for-words hospital scrubs and I’m rubbing his back and we’re riding the wheelchair down to get him masked up for anesthesia, I wonder if we’ve made the right decision. Maybe this is just a modern day hoax, a ridiculous elective surgery whose sole purpose is to transfer cash from my child’s college savings account directly to the ENT’s child’s tuition fund. Or, maybe, as many anonymous moms on the Internet have told me, this will change my child’s life. He’ll be a new person. He’ll get a good night’s sleep. He won’t complain after he runs around the track. He’ll stop whining. He’ll never be grumpy.

The whole procedure takes 30 minutes and first we check in with the doctor, who has probably done 30,0000000000000 adenoidectomies in his lifetime, and then we check in on C, who is fast asleep from the anesthesia, groggy and helpless in his little bed. For two hours, he fights the grogginess and the nausea and we finally get him into the car for a not-heard-since-2-years-old screaming car ride home. C watches Ghostbusters which is apparently very restorative. The anesthesia has worn off so well that he doesn’t even go to bed that early.

He seems totally fine the next morning and I ship him off to school because the ENT told me I could send him to school the next day and I am just not the kind of mom who likes my kid lounging around the house. Yeah, I’m that kind of mom. But at 11:30 the school nurse is calling me to report that C is tired and says his throat hurts. I’m like, yeah, whatever, my throat hurts too sometimes, get over it. They know I work from home. They’re totally taking advantage of me. I take my time and when I go to pick him up he’s a bench in the main office with all the teachers streaming right by him, which is totally cruel if you ask me. I ask him, do you really feel bad? Are you really tired? Are you really sure you can’t handle school? Is it really that bad? You aren’t going home and watching a movie or playing with Legos. You’re going home and READING. The principal is 2 steps from me.

We leave school and in the end I take C grocery shopping and we eat a nice lunch on the roof of the grocery store (OK, it’s Whole Foods, which really doesn’t seem like a “grocery store,” more like a giant luxury box) and C doesn’t eat much and when we’re walking the aisles he takes my hand and says, Mommy, you think I was just trying to leave school because I didn’t want to go to school. But I LOVE school.

And then I feel bad. Doesn’t it so often end that way?