Calfgrit6 was feeling and acting pretty normal, a week after his tonsillectomy. After 10 days, it seemed all was over. Then Sunday night he came into our room around 10:30 p.m. saying he was throwing up. His mom was with him before I could shake the sleep out of my head. By the time I got up and to our bathroom, she had him over the trashcan. “He’s throwing up blood,” she said.

Oh crap. Okay, this had also happened with Calfgrit10, about 10 days after he had his tonsils removed back when he was about 4 years old. So we understood what was probably happening. His surgery wound, or both, probably popped a scab and so blood was seeping into his throat and being swallowed. After a while sitting on his stomach, it comes up.

“This is a lot of blood,” his mother said. They were both over the trashcan, so I couldn’t see the results, myself. Calfgrit6 mentioned he had thrown up in his room, so I was sent to check it out.

I walked down the hall and flicked on the lights of our little boy’s room. Sweet Mother of God! It looked like a horror movie had taken place in there. There was blood on his bed, on his nightstand, on the floor beside the bed, and there was a big pool of it right at his door, an inch from where I had stepped into his room.

I stood staring at the mess for a few moments, thinking, “I have no idea how to clean this up.”

I went back to our bathroom where Cowgrit was trying to keep our little guy calm so he wouldn’t make his pain and stomach worse. I informed her about the six gallons of blood in his room.

I was told to get dressed and to go get the doctor’s phone number. We had been given an information sheet explaining possible problems/complications from the surgery, and bleeding afterwards was an item to prompt calling the doctor’s emergency number. I pulled out that sheet, and called the doc. I expected to reach the doc’s answering service or something, but apparently it was the man’s personal phone.

“Hello?” said the sleepy voice on the phone.

“Um, hi,” I said started. “My son had a tonsillectomy about a week ago, and he’s now throwing up blood. A lot of blood.”

He asked for a little more info, like the patient’s age, and then he told me to take him to the hospital emergency room. He’d call his on-call partner and have him meet us there.

I finished getting dressed and got some clothes for Calfgrit6, while Cowgrit cleaned the little guy up a bit — washed most of the blood off him. He was calmed down, and seemed to have emptied is stomach.

As he and I were ready to run out the door, Cowgrit called her mother, who lives just a few minutes away. Calfgrit10 was still in his room, fast asleep, and we didn’t want to wake him and up and drag him to the ER with us. Calfgrit6 was calm but concerned about going to the hospital. We consoled him as best we could and then he and I left in my truck. Cowgrit would come behind us after her mother arrived to stay at our house with the sleeping older boy.

I and CG6 got to the hospital at 11:25 p.m., and check in and triage went pretty smooth and fast. 20 minutes after signing in, we were put in a curtained room in the ER. Calfgrit6 was doing fine — no vomiting or problems. His mother arrived within 5 more minutes, while the nurse was checking with us. “The doctor will be here shortly to examine him and see what’s going on,” we were told.

We sat down beside Calfgrit’s little child-sized bed, and waited. We tried to get him to go to sleep, and we tried to get comfortable in the hard chairs. There was just too much activity outside the curtain for him to close his eyes, and our chairs were too uncomfortable for us to nod off. An hour passed without anyone coming back to us. We continued to try to coax Calfgrit6 to at least just shut his eyes and rest. He hadn’t thrown up any more, and said he felt okay. 30 more minutes passed with no one checking in on us. I took a peek outside the curtain, and there was plenty of people around, and not much activity, (compared to what I expected in an ER).

At 2:45, we hit the two-hour mark of waiting in the room. I groggily stepped outside the curtains intending to flag down our nurse to ask what we were waiting on. I didn’t want to be rude or annoying — you know, “that” kind of patient’s-dad — but really, two hours? The doc on the phone had said his on-call doc would meet us at the ER, so what was the hold up? Our boy wasn’t in danger or pain, so I wasn’t wanting to demand attention, but with absolutely no attention since we first go there, I wanted to just make sure we weren’t forgotten or something.

I thought maybe they were just waiting to see if the boy vomited anymore or something. Were we going to be just sent back home? Was there something going on behind the scenes that was why we were just left with no word? While standing outside the curtain, I kept seeing our nurse zipping in and out of rooms and around corners, just outside the range of contact without shouting. But then another nurse saw me and asked me if she could help me. I told her we had been waiting in here for two hours, and I just wanted to know what’s up.

Now, it was almost 3:00 in the morning. I was tired, sleepy, groggy, with an anxious 6 year old in the hospital emergency room. I didn’t want to be an ass, but I fear I came across pretty rough and annoyed. This nurse said she’d check with our nurse and find out for me. I sat back down next to Calfgrit6’s bed.

A few minutes later, another nurse came to us to apply a pulse monitor to Calfgrit6’s finger. A pulse monitor? Really? The kid had been there for over two hours without any problems, or any other monitoring, and she was taking his pulse? I immediately figured this was just to give us some attention, and the fact that no attention was paid to the pulse display throughout the rest of our stay confirms to me that it was just for making us feel like we hadn’t been forgotten. I mean, I was just asking for information on what we were waiting around for; they didn’t need to make a false show of attention.

Half an hour later, the ER doc got to us and checked our boy out. The bleeding was stopped, his stomach was not upset, and he was not in pain. So the doc just told the nurse to let us check out. <sigh> About 3 hours in the hospital.

When we got home, it was going on 4:00 a.m. By the time we got Calfgrit6 back in his own bed, and we back in our own, it was 4:00 on the dot.

Half of our July 4th was spent cleaning up the mess of blood from the night before.

With Calfgrit6 recuperating from his tonsillectomy, and with no school because of track out time, (year-round schedule), the boys have had some time to watch some movies. Their mother borrowed a stack of movies from a friend, and I looked through it to see what was on the schedule: all the Harry Potter movies, plus The Princess Bride.  I’m not a fan of the HP series, but Calfgrit10 has read all the books, (as has his mother). Over the past several days, the family has sat down and watched a HP movie each evening. I’ve joined in for a little while during a couple of the movies, just to enjoy the family enjoying something. (I have to refrain from rolling my eyes at a lot of scenes in the films.)

But The Princess Bride is something I would enjoy watching again. The TPB package looked kind of “accidentally” included in the stack of HP DVDs, and no one had mentioned making time to watch it this week. I wanted to watch the movie with the boys, as I thought it would be something they’d both enjoy, but I knew they’d be immediately turned off just by the title of the film. “Princess” and “Bride” aren’t words that excite young boys, 10 and 6 years old.

When I mentioned to the boys that I wanted to watch it with them, they reacted exactly as expected: they scrunched their faces and slightly shook their heads. I intentionally didn’t show them the DVD package. Calfgrit10 asked, “What’s it about?” with a tone of doubt.

“It’s got sword fights,” I explained, “a giant, monster eels, rodents of unusual size, a six-fingered man, and a dread pirate.”

“Huh?” they both responded. Yeah, those aren’t things you expect to find in a movie titled, “The Princess Bride.”

“Trust me,” I encouraged. “You’ll like it.” Then I did my best Inigo Montoya impersonation: “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”

Trust me they did, and like it they did.

There were several times that Calfgrit10 laughed out loud. He even often put in his own commentary on various scenes and lines, much to my annoyance. I was glad he was engaged with the story, but good lord, he talked over some lines I wanted him to hear.

And every time a new character walked into a scene, Calfgrit6 would ask, “Who is that?” before the character got three paces in. “Why is he doing that?” “Where are they going?”

I had to say, “Just watch and listen,” probably twenty times through the film. I was rather surprised. They didn’t do this during the Star Wars movies. Maybe they knew so much about the Star Wars story already that they never got confused for a moment about what was going on or who someone was. I didn’t hear any of this during the Harry Potter movies, but maybe that was because when I sat down with them, they had already been through a couple of the movies and, like Star Wars, already recognized the people and places.

Still, in the end, they both seemed to enjoy the movie. They didn’t even seem to mind so much the kissing parts. And they were pretty revved up and difficult to herd toward bed afterward — that’s usually a sign that they got worked up about a movie.

After getting them both calmed and tucked in for the night, I told them, each, “As you wish.”

Bullgrit

Spent all yesterday morning at the hospital for Calfgrit6’s tonsillectomy. His doctor recommended the procedure after it was confirmed that he’d had strep throat 7 times over the passed year. Calfgrit10 had his tonsils removed a few years ago for the same reason. I’m the only one in our family who still has his tonsils — a fact I intend to brag about whenever I can. “My tonsils are STRONG!”

You know, it’s kind of ridiculous how long the whole outpatient surgery thing takes. The actual procedure was 40 minutes, but we were at the hospital for over 4 hours! His surgery was scheduled for 10:30, but we were to check in at 8:30. We were on time to the hospital, then we sat in the waiting room for about an hour and a half. We were taken back to the preparation room at 10:00, where we waited through meeting all the doctors, nurses, anesthesiologists, etc. until about 10:45. When they took Calfgrit6 back to the OR, his mother and I went back to the waiting room.

We sat in the waiting room for about 45 minutes, when the doc came out and quickly told us that everything went perfect and fine. A few minutes later and a nurse came out and took us back to the recovery room where our little boy had just awakened. We hung out in the recovery room till well after 1:00. Finally, we were able to take our little guy home.

Everyone in the staff at the hospital was great, though. Everyone from the front desk to the nurses in back in the prep and recovery rooms were very friendly and helpful, so I can’t complain about any way we were treated. It just takes a long time to go through the processing of everything at a busy hospital.

In the prep room, Calfgrit6 was great. We had been explaining and describing the whole process and concept of surgery to him for several days, so he was pretty aware of exactly he would be going through. The nurses at the hospital were very nice and helpful when dealing with him — he wasn’t the first child they’d dealt with there, even on that day. He picked out a smell for his gas mask, he drew on his bed sheet with (nurse provided, washable) magic markers, he watched some cartoons, and he took his oral meds very well. It was fun to watch the prep meds kicking in on him. He got glazed-eyed and slow, even at one point using his fingers to hold his eyes open to watch the TV.

In the recovery room, though, he was not doing well. He was in some pain and was feeling very sick. He was crying and pathetic. The nurses explained this sometimes happens, but it didn’t happen to Calfgrit10 those years ago, so we didn’t think to warn CG6 that he might feel this way afterward. We held him and rubbed his head and did all we could to make him feel better. He said, “I want my tonsils back.”

It took a long while, and some doses of morphine, to get him calm and quiet, but he did eventually get better so we could take him home. Once home, I picked him up from his car seat and carried him inside and upstairs to our bedroom. I laid him in our bed and covered him up. He lay there, calm and tired. I got halfway back down stairs when I heard him call out, weakly, “I’m going to throw up.” And then I heard that disgusting sound.

We ran back to the room to find him covered in yuck. He hadn’t eaten anything in about 20 hours, and most of his meds went through his I.V., so I don’t know how he could have anything in his stomach to throw up. We got him showered, and the bed sheets changed, and got him back in bed. He laid quietly and rested the remainder of the day, only barely eating or drinking anything.

Right before sleep time, we gave him some more pain meds. He immediately threw up again. <sigh> We waited a few minutes and then gave him the pain meds again. He held it down this time. Then we had to wake him up in the middle of the night to keep him on his pain meds schedule, and he threw that up several minutes later. All through the night and into early morning, he threw up everything he swallowed — water, pain meds, anti-nausea meds, nothing at all.

We didn’t expect this. No one has slept much, and the poor little guy is on the verge of dehydration. The doctor’s office open at 8:00 a.m., and we’re going to call then and see what can be done. He’s doing better this morning than when he was in the recovery room, but this has gotten complicated. We totally didn’t expect all this; Calfgrit10 didn’t have these problems after his tonsillectomy.

As hard as this is right now, the end result of this trauma should be that he’ll stop having so many throat infections. And that will mean a happier life for the little guy.

Bullgrit

My resident “adviser” has suggested that I really aught to make a post explaining who/what “Bullgrit” is. This adviser occasionally puts links to this site on her Facebook wall, and she sometimes gets questions about them. Questions like:

“What is BULLGRIT? Is the link safe to click on?”

“Who is Bullgrit?”

“Wow, that blogger is a big dork. I pity his wife. Do you know them?”

I reply to the advice with, “But there’s a Who is Bullgrit link right on the main page.”

But I’m told, “No one clicks on and reads that page.”

Okay, well, let me post that page here at the top of my blog to put it right up in front of everyone’s face:

* * *

Who is Bullgrit?

Good old boy, good ol’ boy, good ole boy – noun, informal, slang
A man having the qualities regarded as typical of males of small towns and rural areas of the South: a relaxed or informal manner, unsophisticated good fellowship, and strong loyalty to family and friends.

I was born, raised, and still live in the Southern region of the United States.
I currently live about a one hour drive from where I was born, two hours from where I grew up, three hours from where I went to college, and no more than four hours from anywhere I’ve ever had an address.

Although I’ve never lived outside the South, I have traveled a fair bit. In the US, I’ve traveled as far north as New York and Illinois, and as far west as Colorado and California, plus a few states between here and there. Outside the US, I’ve only been to Sweden, (so far).

I know the South, I love the South, I live the South. Other regions of the country, (and world), have their good stuff, but I’d never want to live there. The South, with all its good and bad, is my home.

I’m college-educated and open-minded. I’ve lived and worked with people from all over the country and world, so I’m pretty well diversificated. I’m not an ignorant redneck, although I’m no Renaissance man either.

I’m a writer and editor by profession.

I’m a writer and editor by hobby, also.

I’m 43 years old, and I have a wife and two young sons: Cowgrit, Calfgrit10, and Calfgrit6. (If it ain’t obvious, the number after the boys’ names represents their ages.)

In many ways, I’m a typical middle-aged, Southern, American man; in some ways I’m not. And whether it’s typical or not, I have a geek-streak: I like science fiction, fantasy, comic books, computer games, and table-top games.

Welcome to my world.

Bullgrit