Day 17 - Yellow gauze be gone

Last night, I emailed some update pics to the Doctors. Dr. Reinisch e-mailed me back and said Jack's ear looks great, but that we need to get the yellow gauze off. The longer we leave it on, the more the hair will grow into it. He also said we should wash Jack's hair and clean his ear up. We are not clear on how to do that and whether we need to take precautions to not get the ear canal wet, so for now, Jack is going on week 3 with no bath. His hair is just growing back, so it doesn't really look dirty and he is not itching his scalp, so I was not so worried about it. But Dr. Reinisch was pretty clear about that gauze...

So, tonight we removed the netting again and to my surprise, the cup had almost completely come loose. So, it was a good thing we took the netting off, or we wouldn't have noticed that. We then soaked the gauze with wet washcloths and I just started gently pulling. After an hour, I finally was making progress working around his BAHA softband.



Jack was very patient (okay, I bribed him again and let him watch a Thomas movie while I did it). He kept turning his head and saying, "Go slower mommy!" I pulled in the direction of the hair with two pieces - top of the head forward and back of the head downward. Luckily, the blue stitch that I thought was left behind was only in the gauze, no skin involved. I was told that stuff would just kind of fall off after a while, but man it was really stuck!

Here is the top of his head at the end:



Finally, it was all off and he had two pieces of chocolate. At this rate, by the end of the year we will have a kid with two ears and no teeth. We sort of cleaned on his ear a little and then put the cup and netting all back on. We are down to our last cup until the supplies from Dr. Reinisch's office arrive tomorrow.

Dr. Roberson's office called and asked to see Jack tomorrow instead of Wednesday, so we will go down tomorrow.

More soon...