The Consult

If anyone (even us) ever says to you, “Hey!  Let’s go traveling with tiny twins!” you should respond as follows, “Are you crazy???”  And then, you should do it anyway because it is the sort of character-building endeavor that not enough people get to experience.  Just like there aren’t enough chances to get a flat tire or to hit every red light when you are running late or to forget to buy your Thanksgiving turkey and discover they only have pig’s feet left at the store late on Wednesday evening.  Would you believe that our minivan isn’t big enough for a pack ‘n play, 3 small suitcases, a bouncy seat, a breastpump station, 2 twin seats, 2 adult seats, a giant box of diapers, a bag of toys and snacks, and a stroller?  It isn’t!  So we dumped the stroller. 🙂

We packed up every bib and burp cloth we own (except the ones we dirtied the night before we left), as well as all the outfits that currently fit our cuties, and left early Friday morning for St. Louis.  It’s a 3 hour drive.  We made it in just under 5!  It takes alot of time to pull over and feed the babies.  I’m so glad our van has tinted windows so I can stay on my pumping schedule and keep up with these little hungry ones!  We all went in and began our lengthy wait in the reception area.  They are never running on time in this office.

Once we got back into the room, they found Rissa’s hernia (it hasn’t been nearly as big as it was when we discovered it, but it’s still there!  We were prepared to point it out since the first examiner couldn’t find it, but then our surgeon saw it immediately) and I got to feel her tiny ovary through the skin.  This is NOT good.  The muscle wall is weak right where her ovary is located, and since ovaries are free-floating, her left one popped forward and was sitting too close to the surface.  She could lose it if we let this go unchecked.  It was established that we were available for surgery on Monday and so were they, so we made an appointment.  (We were planning for a very likely surgery on Monday from the beginning, just in case).  They plan to repair her left inguinal hernia and then do exploration on the right side to catch any muscle weakness over there since this tends to happen on both sides.  We are so thankful that we saw this so soon and that she is able to have surgery so that we are only preventing problems rather than trying to fix them later!  I would feel awful if she lost an ovary at age 3 months.

Here we are in the office:

Then we began the second half of our journey, the 3 hour trip (actual time was 5 hours again) to Kansas City to visit Joy, Andrew, and Sam!  It was a very long day.  I don’t like having the babies in their carseats for so long, but we pulled over to give them breaks to hang out with us and just tried to get there as quick as we can.  We arrived, fed them, and put them to bed.  They slept for a very nice long segment of 4 hours of sleep (5 hours between feedings) and it was great!