Post-Op: Day 1

Emmett slept the entire way home from his procedure (over an hour!), which was the longest he slept all day. As soon as we got home he took a bottle, which was such a relief! I took a picture of his latch on the bottle to compare to a previous picture prior to starting therapy. Holy cow, the difference is unreal! On the left, you can see how shallow his latch is prior to the procedure and how he's struggling to fully flange his lips. Whereas, on the right you can see how much deeper he's able to latch on the bottle and his lips are totally flanged.

I also noticed that his bottom lip appeared much more prominent than it did pre-frenectomy. The tongue tie was putting so much pressure on the floor of his mouth that it was restricting his bottom lip from flipping out like normal.

Overall, things have honestly been going way better than I expected.

Those of you that know me well, know that I have to prepare myself for the worst possible scenario, so reality only ends up better that what I was expecting.

I went into yesterday evening with the expectation of Emmett screaming all night long because I had read that some babies did this the night of their procedure. I had also heard that things would get worse before they got better, so this was another fact that led to me thinking this. I’m not going to lie, I was so worried about Emmett being in pain that I ended up pre-dosing him with Tylenol an hour before the procedure. The doctor only recommended using Arnica for pain management, but our pediatrician said it's totally safe for Emmett to have Tylenol. I also feel like pain is under treated in infants, in general, so I decided I would feel best if we gave Emmett Tylenol around the clock for the first 24-48 hours.

Surprisingly, Emmett did pretty well overnight. After he had his bottle, we gave him a nice long bubble bath (his favorite!). We had to do the stretches right before his nighttime bottle, which were awful. He was hysterical for quite some time after but we finally got him to calm down and take his bottle. After he finished his bottle we were able to lay him in the bassinet.

He woke up around 11:00pm, so both Brett and I got up to do the stretches. It took him awhile to calm down again, so Brett fed him and held him from 11:00pm-1:30am due to being intermittently fussy. Brett woke me up around 1:30am due to him being up with Emmett for awhile, so I gave Emmett another dose of Tylenol and held him while he went back to sleep. He started waking up about an hour later, so Brett was up with me again to do the stretches with me and then I fed Emmett and held him while he was sleeping until 4:00am. He took another bottle at that time and then I was able to get him in his bassinet. He slept until about 6:30am, when he was on and off fussy. This hasn't been anything out of the ordinary for Emmett as he typically starts to stir a lot in the early morning hours due to not pooping throughout the night. He finally pooped on his own around 8:00am and seemed to be pretty comfortable.

We headed to Emmett's speech appointment at 10:00am, where they watched me perform the stretches to make sure I was doing them correctly. Overall, she said I was doing pretty good with them, but she had a couple tips to help me get a deeper stretch on his tongue.

That dang tongue stretch is the hardest and most gruesome one, for sure.

The Speech Pathologist reviewed some of the speech exercises that were shown to us at Emmett's evaluation appointment a few weeks ago. I shared with her the small improvements we've been noticing so far, such as his deeper latch, and she was so happy to hear that we're already seeing progress. She helped me become more comfortable with supporting Emmett while feeding to help encourage him to use his tongue the correct way and reduce his air intake during feeds.

To support a baby's latch while feeding, you place your thumb and pointer finger on both their cheeks and squeeze lightly. You then take your middle, pinky, or ring finger and gently push on the base of their tongue, behind the chin, while holding the bottle.

I don't have a great picture of this technique to share, but the ones below will give you an idea of what I’m talking about.

It's quite difficult to do to say the least, but I’m finally starting to feel more comfortable doing this with each of his feeds. I've been pretty adamant about doing it for most of his feeds throughout the day today and I honestly feel like he's been less gassy and refluxy, so I'd like to think it's helping him! I've also noticed he's dribbling way less at the corner of the mouth during supported feeds and he seems to be finishing his bottle much quicker than before. I’m also so happy to say that Emmett has continued to poop on his own, which I was expecting to regress sfter the procedure!

It's so hard to tell if these small improvements we are seeing on day one are truly imlrovements, because it could just be due to Emmett having a "good day". As a reminder, the severity of his symptoms change in a cyclical fashion from day to day, so time will tell if these signs are truly progress or not.

Tomorrow we will get Emmett's repeat scan results from the chiropractor and he will have his first post-op adjustment, so I will be sure to fill you all in on this in the next day or two. For now, we are hanging in there and just focusing on taking it one day at a time. We truly appreciate those of you who have reached out to check in on us!