The song that never ends

I feel like that’s what this situation with Reed’s cyst has been. He has been doing GREAT. Feeling great. Acting great. Incision looked great. My mom saw his scar on Monday and even commented on how good it looked.

Tuesday evening I was sitting with him, and he leaned his head back and my heart sank. The area around his incision was incredibly red, it looked/felt like extremely dry chapped skin and it didn’t look good. We couldn’t do anything at that point so we decided to wait until this morning to check it again.

He woke up and it didn’t exactly look any worse, but he woke up with his jaw puffy and swollen. :( We had taken a picture last night and took another one this morning. I had a card for the ENT surgical nurse from before 2nd surgery in case we needed it. I knew his doctor would be in surgeries all day today and wasn’t sure if we’d hear anything. I called the nurse and had to leave a message. She called me back within 10 minutes and I told her what was going on. She told me to send her an email with the pictures. She said she would forward the email to our doctor and text him to look at them quickly.

One of the photos I sent her was this one:

She happened to be on the phone with me later when she got the email and her response when she opened it wasn’t good. :( The doctor saw them and told her we needed to come in. I wanted to go ahead and go today. I talked to Zach and we made plans to leave shortly before noon and then we started hearing about poor road conditions due to freezing rain. I think that was the right choice because there were many accidents on the interstate and lots of standstill traffic.

We have plans to go down tomorrow. The doctor told the nurse we’ll have to do a needle aspiration to figure out what the infection is. They went ahead and called in another antibiotic to get him started on since we couldn’t get down there today. Thankfully this one tastes much better than the one he finished yesterday.

This poor kid just cannot catch a break. We don’t know what’s going on and from what the nurse said, the doctor feels as frustrated as we do. We are getting nothing but phenomenal care from ACH and are so thankful for that. Thank goodness also for technology because it was a blessing to send the photos of his wound to the nurse. Since our doctor was in surgery, she sent him those photos and he was able to view them too. Pretty remarkable, especially when you’re being treated from a distance.

On top of the issues with this, the weather was pretty dicey today. The kids and Zach all got out of school early. Shortly after I got home, the roads started getting worse. There’s a chance they won’t have school tomorrow and hopefully we will be able to make the trip to Little Rock. This hasn’t been easy, but we know eventually, he WILL be 100% healed.