Jackson's big day!

Jackson had his surgery on Friday the 13th! It is a good thing we are not superstitious. Everything went really well. Our surgeon, Dr. Fucci was fantastic. I really love him. He is one of the top doctors in the United States for cochlear implants. I took Jackson to the hospital at 5:30am to check in and talk with the staff before the surgery. The surgery was at 7:30. He had to wear this cute little hospital gown and hat. So of course I took a million pictures of him looking so cute before surgery. He was a happy little guy that morning. Dr. Fucci came and talked with us before the surgery. He was making me laugh. He came in and asks me "So what are we doing today?" As if he didn't know. I told him that we were doing an implant on the right side. Then he points to Jackson's ear and says, " Is this the right ear?" I said yes and he took out a permanent pen and writes YES on Jackson's right earlobe. He wanted to make sure that I knew what he was doing and that we marked the right ear for surgery. We definitely didn't want any mistakes, that is for sure. Jackon's specialist, Mary was there. She was so sweet. She wanted to come to be a support and part of his big day. Mary, Ryan and I ate breakfast at the cafeteria and then sat and talked with her while we were waiting for him to be out of surgery. His surgery was about 2 hours long. When he was finally done we were able to see him once he woke up and was in recovery. When I first walked in to the recovery room I heard someones baby screaming. I thought wow, that is not a very happy baby. As we reached where Jackson was I realized that it was my baby that was screaming. I didn't recognize his voice because I had never heard him cry like that before. It broke my heart to see him so sad and uncomfortable. I gave him something to drink and held him and the nurse gave him more drugs to help with his pain and he fell back asleep. The rest of the day he did pretty well, but you could tell he was uncomfortable. He would mostly sleep, but would wake up every so often and cry. I would comfort him and give him some fluids and he would go back to sleep. At around 6:00 that night he threw up all over everything. He was on morphine and the drugs were making his tummy upset. After he threw up he was a new man. He was happy the rest of the evening. I told the nurse not to give him anymore morphine and we used lortab for the rest of the night. My parents were nice enough to bring me an extra change of clothes since I smelt like vomit. My parents were laughing at how hyper he was, rolling and playing around in his crib. It was so funny to watch him. He just had major surgery and here he was bouncing off the walls like nothing ever happened. My nurses were amazed also to see all the energy this little guy suddenly had. At around 8:00 Jackson starting getting a temperature, so the nurses came in pretty frequently during the first part of the night to make sure it wasn't getting worse. They kept waking him up and sometimes it was hard to get him back to bed, but after about 2:00 in the morning the temperature was gone and we both slept for a little bit without interruptions. Dr. Fucci checked Jackson in the morning and everything looked good. So he took off his head dressing and gave us some prescriptions and sent us home. Jackson is doing great. He has a little swelling and bruising, but other than that his is doing well. We go in for a follow up check next week and his implant will be turned on next month. His ear has to heal before we turn on his hardware. Thanks everyone for your support and concern for our little guy. He did great and we felt like the surgery went well. Only time will tell now how well this implant will work for him. Here are all the pictures.