When it comes to kids, surgery is never routine
OUR daughter had her tonsils shrunk and her adenoids removed last week. Big deal, you say? Routine procedure, you say?
Well, I’m here to tell you there’s no such thing as a routine procedure when it comes to your kids.
There’s nothing routine about a surgeon yanking out a pair of glands from your child’s throat or using needle electrodes to zap their tonsils into oblivion.
Where do tonsils go when they die? And what will catch the germs in their absence? If tonsils and gall bladders and appendixes and adenoids aren’t really that important, then why do we have them in the first place?
I don’t believe in superfluous organs, but I googled alternatives to tonsil removal and the answers didn’t fill me with confidence either. An Ayurvedic gargle made up with the flowers of Banaphsha? Are we treating my daughter’s enlarged tonsils or a dragon on Game Of Thrones?
Lick warm lemons laced with salt and pepper, another recommendation read. No thanks.
Make up a juice of raw carrot, beetroot and cucumber juice in a ratio of 3:1:1. That sounds oddly specific and also my NutriBullet exploded when I tried to make pesto, so what’s the out-of-pocket cost of this surgery again?
I realise it’s quite a privilege to book in surgery and not have to wait six months for it to happen. Because dwelling on the idea of our unsuspecting five-year-old
going under the knife for even a few weeks was triggering my extremely Jewish impulse to catastrophise.
When the day finally arrived, we weren’t sure how to break it to her. So we lied.
I’ve written before about acceptable levels of parental lying, but I think lying about surgery is not comparable to lying about McDonald’s being closed at midday, or a tiny benevolent fairy that flies into rooms and trades coins for teeth for some reason.
So up until the moment she got into her surgical scrubs she thought she was getting her ears checked.
If that sounds cruel consider a full disclosure approach. “Honey, a nice doctor is going to reach into your throat and rip out a nonvital organ tomorrow. But don’t worry because you’ll get jelly and ice cream. Sweet dreams!”
Thankfully, kids are pretty resilient, so she handled the whole ordeal like a boss. In a strange twist I think she was even enjoying herself. I was not.
For the fourth time now, I’ve had the displeasure of accompanying my child into theatre as the anaesthetist gets prepped for putting them to sleep. At home this usually takes an hour, involves at least five bathroom trips, eight glasses of water, and a bedtime story about a naughty kid that gets sent to the gulags for not going to sleep.
At the hospital it happens in seconds, leading me to ponder ways I could create a diversion and sneak the gas machine home.
To her credit, the anaesthetist really put my daughter’s mind at ease with a fantastical story about how this watermelon-flavoured gas was sending her off to a fairy party with tangerine trees and marmalade skies. Were they putting magic mushrooms in there?
I was starting to feel like everything was actually going to be OK, until a nurse warned that my kid was about to go full Linda Blair.
“Don’t worry if they flail around and their eyes roll back into their heads,” they winked. “It’s completely normal.”
Of course I downplayed all this to my colleagues when I returned to work the next day. “How’d she go?”
“Oh, fine,” I said. “It was pretty routine.”