A Wedding and a Surgery

So we had this wedding to attend in rural, southern Missouri…We drive almost 7 hours and get into town with barely enough time to check into the motel and switch into wedding clothes. When Glory pulls Oliver out of his car seat, I hear, “OH MY GOD JASON LOOK!”…

I scramble over and notice an ENORMOUS bludge on his neck under his left chin/ear. There are a few minutes of confusion as some of her family is leaving to go the the wedding and we are trying to get our pediatrician on the phone at 5pm on a Saturday. We finally get a nurse on the line and she tell sus as long as he isn’t running a fever of having difficulty breathing, we should be okay to drive him to the nearest hospital after the wedding. The ceremony is about 25 minutes and we “high tail” it out of town dialing hospitals as we drive.

We find the hospital that is closest, but there is a crazy mix up with some transferred calls and we get directions to a DIFFERENT hospital that is farther away. That turned out to be very fortunate, because we ended up at the only hospital in 100 sq miles that had a pediatric center AND a resident Ear, Nose and Throat specialist.

Long story short - they hook him (as we held him down and he screamed) to an IV and immediately ordered a CT Scan. That showed a definite absess and they wanted to surgically drain it ASAP. O.R. was booked for the night so they scheduled him for 8 AM sunday morning. Surgery went fine but we had to spend another night in the hospital and finally got back home to TX late monday afternoon…

Good Times.