My (anti?) Superhero

What do you think of when you hear 'Superhero'? A superpower. And what's Maia's superpower? She's impervious to pain.

We took her into the hospital yesterday morning for her operation. Normally a total milk fiend, by the time we made it to the top of the operation list (five + hours), she had fasted for 18 hours, and coped admirably. She even had the energy to flirt with the best looking surgeon. That's my girl!

The surgery was more complicated than they expected, the cut that went three quarters around her finger was all the way down to the bone, and the bone was broken with a chip fragmented off at the growth plate. They had to put a pin through the top of her finger to hold the pieces together. They stitched the cut shut and then made a huge boxing glove around her hand with gauze and tape to protect her from bumping it, as the pin was sticking through the top of her finger.

We had to stay over night for pain relief and 'elevation'. In the end, she didn't have any pain relief as she was so chipper, and the elevation was a no-go too. It took me an absolute age to get her to sleep as the ward was bright and bustling with activity. After she fell asleep a nurse put this big webbing around her boxing glove. It worked on the same principle as a Chinese finger trap, where the harder it is pulled, the more secure it would become at the cast end. Like this:

She left a big three foot chain, which she wound around the top bar of the cot, raising her arm in the air. "Wonder how long this'll last..." I thought to myself. (The answer is 15 seconds). Maia sleeps like a dervish. Or like a crocodile doing a death roll. So when her arm was tied up vertically, she tried to roll, and couldn't, so screamed instead. So I sighed an spent an age settling her down again. After she was asleep the nurse said she would try again once she was soundly sleeping. 'Whatever,' I thought, 'good luck to you'... But I was pretty concerned about the three foot chain in her cot getting tangled around her neck so I rolled it up and knotted it close to her cast.

Early in the morning, we were both still in our beds, her with a bottle and me on the floor so I couldn't see her. She was lying down while having it so I was hoping that she would go back to sleep. 'Umm, she just took her cast off', the mother next to us said to the nurse. So the nurses whisked her off to the treatment room to re-bandage her hand. They were gone for ages, and came back looking both sheepish and slightly sick, maybe even somewhat amazed. 'She pulled the pin out of her finger too'. The pin holding her bone together?! Yep, that's the one. She must have pulled on the knot in the webbing, which tightened around the cast, so she could pull it off with relative ease. And then yanked the pin out with her tiny fingers, in complete silence. After further x-rays, the surgeons said that there was nothing more they could do.

So we're home now, and my immediate task is to make clothes with gigantic armholes as she had nothing that I can get her cast through.