Jon’s stitches were removed on Wednesday in what I can only describe as an extremely fiddly operation!
The plan was to bring Jonathan in having not eaten for 3 hours (a precaution against him being sick while he’s too drowsy to deal with it), and sleepy, so that the sedative would have help in its work. Indeed.
An hour after the sedative had been given, they let me move on to feeding him to see if that would help. Problem was that while young Jon would not actually sleep, he was very dopey by that point and feeding just wasn’t happening…
So we moved onto the second dose of sedative. Which didn’t taste any better than the first one judging by the general choking and gagging that accompanied its passage down Jon’s throat. And finally he dropped off to sleep, all swaddled up on the table.
Then the tricky bit was extracting the dummy from his mouth and keeping him asleep while they shone a bright light on his face. Ah yes.
It did work up to a point and the trainee nurse who was helping Mel, the cleft-team nurse, very carefully cut the stitch on his nose and extracted the big foam plug that had been so annoying our Jon for the last 5 days. Great as this was, it was a step too far in the keeping him asleep mission, and he woke up.
Back to me being left alone with Jon again to try and get him back to sleep.
About two and a half hours after we’d started, Jonathan was finally, properly, asleep, but now in his pushchair and none of us wanted to experiment with getting him out of that while maintaining status quo. So I dismantled the top end of the pushchair, until it was just the backrest and the handles and Mel knelt on the floor beside it, armed with her ultra-fine tweezers, and scissors with the smallest blades I’ve ever seen.
Each stitch, of which there must have been about 8, had to be gripped carefully with the tweezers and then cut. And I lost count of the number of times Mel had just managed to get a grip on a hair-fine thread, only to have Jon feel the ticklish touch on his lip and thrash his head violently from side to side — in his sleep — so that she had to pull back hurriedly and start again.
Finally though, the last one was done and Mel clambered up off the floor with a palpable sigh of relief. What a performance, but definitely worth it — the stitches have kept it all together brilliantly and he’s healed up really well.