Sunday, January 29, 2012

...on the loss of an -ologist

Will's sinus surgery is nearly 2 weeks past us now. He had his post-op follow up late last week. We learned that Will had 2 different kinds of bacteria growing in his sinuses, thankfully both of which are common and easily treated.

The fungal results take 4 weeks to come back. Will's ENT felt, though, that because he hadn't gotten any preliminary results back from the infectious disease people, the likelihood of the fungal results coming back positive was very small. We'll keep waiting for this one for the next couple of weeks, just to be sure! A fungal infection would mean that we gain a new -ologist (an infection disease specialist) since they are the ones who treat fungus.

But for now, at least for the next 2 weeks, we are lucky to have lost an -ologist. Based on the fact that Will is doing so well after his surgery, his ENT indicated that we only ever need to come back if Will has further problems. There was no need for him to be followed regularly. I don't know if Will has ever lost an -ologist before... if anything, he gains at least one new one each year. Sometimes two.

Woo hoo! We all can breathe a collective sigh of relief... including Will! Since his surgery, Will has had none of the congestion problems that have plagued him for the past 3 years. His face smells so good - no more 'death breath!' His sinuses now have a new route of drainage, so this ability to breathe should last for the rest of his life. Now when he gets a cold, it should go away in a week or so, instead of turning into a sinus infection each time because nothing could drain away.

So Will's bed time routine no longer consists of taking a long bath, spraying saline up his nose, propping his head up on 2 pillows, turning on a humidifier, spraying him again with saline (and repeating several times through the night). He can finally breathe.

You'd think this would mean that Will is sleeping 100,000 times better now, wouldn't you? Unfortunately he isn't. Though he is not congested and clearly not in any more pain from the surgery, he is still waking several times a night... and pretty consistently too. Each time needing to be adjusted in his bed.

He goes to bed at 8. Wakes up around 10. Wakes up around midnight. Between 2a and 3a, he wakes every 15 minutes. After 4a, he sleeps well. Unfortunately on most nights, this means just 2 hours until most of us in the house wake up.

Will is never awake enough during these times that we worry about him having a seizure. Usually he is back to sleep as soon as we adjust him on his bed. But it is so frequent, and so regular, that it makes us think that there is something else going on. I know that most people ebb and flow in their sleep to a point that they wake up lightly many times a night. And this might be the case for Will. He can't adjust his own position in bed. So for us, his "lightly waking and needing attention" means getting out of bed, walking across the house, adjusting Will, waiting for a few minutes to ensure that he goes back to sleep quickly, and going back to bed. All the while trying not to allow your joints to crack to wake up Luke and Matt, and getting back into bed as lightly as possible to allow your lucky still-sleeping spouse to keep on sleeping!

We thought that Will was waking with this frequency because he was congested and couldn't breathe. Now that we've ruled that out, we've got to think of another cause and proceed down the path of fixing that.

I know I've said in the past that Luke sleeps through Will's nighttime shenanigans. But in the past couple of months, he has been coming into our room several nights a week in the middle of the night. More often than not, he says that he doesn't like sleeping in his room and doesn't like his bed.

It is hard to know if Will's antics are keeping Luke awake. It is tough to think that the best thing for Luke might be to not share a room with his twin brother anymore. Let's hope that Will starts to get the hang of sleeping better, so that all of us might have improvement in that area.

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