Alice's lip repair: part two

We arrived in recovery at about 11.30 to find Alice absolutely beside herself screaming, which was pretty horrible. At first nothing seemed to calm her - she wouldn't touch the bottle we'd brought and wasn't impressed with being fed by syringe either, although she must have been starving. Lots of cuddling and a booster shot of morphine later and her heart rate had finally slowed down enough to move her back to the ward, but she was still upset. And we were so busy trying to calm her down that we hardly registered her new appearance at first, although it vaguely sunk in that she looked completely different. The rest of the day was spent alternating between trying to get her to feed and trying to get her to sleep, but it was a vicious circle really - she seemed too exhausted to eat but too hungry to properly sleep. She was getting automatic doses of morphine from a machine attached to a drip in her foot, which was keeping her dopey - and in retrospect may have been affecting her appetite - but not dopey enough to sleep for very long.

By the end of the day we'd managed to get a total of 250ml of milk into her through a syringe, with her fighting almost every tiny swallow. It was a painfully slow and difficult method of feeding and I really started to panic that she wasn't going to take the bottle ever again. But in the early hours of Friday morning she started to at least tolerate the teat in her mouth, and in the early afternoon she deigned to suck it again, thank god. It was an awful night though, me sleeping in snatches on a pull-down bed and Matt miles across town staying with a friend. It was just so counter-intuitive and cruel that we couldn't all be together as a family just when we needed each other most. I think the couple opposite us both managed to stay with their son somehow (even if one of them was sleeping in a chair) and I think we might do this next time if we possibly can.

Alice's new face was initially a bit swollen and the whole upper lip was bloodstained and covered with tape, so we couldn't really see the results at first. But it soon became apparent that the surgeon had done an incredibly neat job - I couldn't believe the smallness and straightness of the scar considering how wide the cleft had been. Her nose looked most different in a way - quite squashed and sort of pulled down in the centre where her 'new' nostril has been formed. But although I was a bit shocked by it all at first (I almost didn't recognise her), it's amazing how quickly I got used to the new look Alice. Especially once she had calmed down a bit and her same old personality began shining through again.

To be continued...