The Little Cuss

Sam is a very active sleeper. He doesn’t just roll around. He sits up, flops over and sleeps with his bum in the air. He’s all over the crib. This makes his tube open up sometimes, leaking puddles of formula all over his crib for as many hours as it goes undetected. Sometimes we tape the valve on his tube to prevent this, but lately I’ve been wrapping him in blankets to stop him from moving around so much. I thought this was a good idea too because it keeps him warm.

Last night he got tangled in the blankets and his tubing, and he got so tightly wrapped up that it pulled his g-tube clean out. This didn’t feel too good and he woke up Ashton with his crying at 2:00 a.m. I woke up to Ashton screaming, “Stephen, come in here!” I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes and jumped out of bed with a feeling of intense dread. As I passed through the kitchen on the way to Sam’s room, Ashton yelled, “His G-tube came out!” I started to panic and grabbed my head with disbelief. She told me to get the emergency kit out of the car, so I ran out in my pajamas to get it. We dumped the contents of the kit on Sam’s floor, but there wasn’t a spare G-tube like there was supposed to be. That meant we had to put his old tube back in, praying it wasn’t damaged.

I sucked the water out of the balloon and Ashton held Sam down while I tried frenetically to get the tube back into the hole in Sam’s stomach. It was something out of a nightmare, and in retrospect it almost seems like it didn’t happen. I finally got the tube in the hole on the third try, and reinflated the balloon with water to hold it in place. We put new pajamas on him and he calmed down and went back to sleep.

This morning Sam woke up and it was like it never happened. He was his normal happy self, even a little goofier than normal. We took him into Dr. Rollins’ office to have a nurse check it out, to make sure everything was okay. She helped us replace the G-tube and confirmed that it was in the right place. Sam fought us the entire time, screaming till his eyes were bloodshot, and it took all three of us to get everything hooked up right. And that was that. I probably sound like a dramatic overreacting parent, but we were really freaked out last night. We’re just glad Sam's okay, the little cuss.