I Think Ashton's Had Enough

Today Ashton started his morning with an early morning wake up call for a chest x-ray and echo-cardiogram. They wanted to get some medicine in him to start with, so they kept him in the room for a while.

While he was waiting for the pain medicine to come up from the pharmacy a couple of ladies came in to do a blood draw. The one he had on Monday was a truly traumatic experience. He absolutely hated it. He climbed into my arms afterward and would not let me put him down for nothing. This time we had them use a numbing cream so he wouldn't feel it. That did absolutely nothing for the anxiety he was feeling, he was expecting a replay of Monday's experience. The numbing cream takes an hour to reach full effect. The ladies applied it and left. Ashton spent the whole hour telling me to get him out of here. He even got up on his own to try to escape a couple of times. He made it a ways down the hall and got tuckered out, so he came back.

They finally came back for the blood draw, and he screamed until the needle went in and he didn't even feel it. He was so proud of himself that he survived the ordeal that we actually heard something we haven't heard for a few days: he laughed. It was music. We sure have missed that. The rest of the morning was filled with tests up until 2:00 when they finally let us have a break.

He asked us today if they had done the surgery yet. We told him they had done it on Tuesday. He didn't remember it (thank goodness) and would not believe us until I took a clearer picture of his incision and showed it to him.

They took the chest tube out yesterday. The tube started a couple of inches below the incision and ran almost the all the way to the top! He screamed when they yanked it out, but can you blame him? That's a lot of tubing.