Matthew had surgery last month and this month it was Austin's turn. Let's hope the trend does not continue. We have known for a while he was going to need it and today was the day. Austin was born tongue tied. Actually that's the first thing the nurse said when he was born. I tried to find a current picture of him sticking out his tongue.
You can see that his tongue doesn't have a point to it and we lovingly refer to it as "butt tongue" Here is another picture I found online.
Here is some info about it from
here.
The medical term for the condition known as tongue-tie is "ankyloglossia". It results when the frenulum (the band of tissue that connects the bottom of the tongue to the floor of the mouth) is too short and tight, causing the movement of the tongue to be restricted.
Tongue-tie is congenital (present at birth) and hereditary (often more that one family member has the condition). It occurs relatively often: between 0.2% and 2% of babies are born with tight frenulums.
So Austin had a frenetomy to get it clipped. It's a pretty minor surgery. Interesting that it is hereditary because my twin sister and I were both born tongue tied! It usually causes problems with breast feeding and eventually speech problems. Austin didn't really have any problems with nursing so we let it go for awhile but when I took him to the ENT he said it was a pretty significant case and we should get it clipped. However we couldn't find a doctor who would take our insurance so we had to wait until I could switch plans so now we finally got it done. I'm curious to see if our baby girl is tongue tied since neither of my sister's kids are.
Here is Austin all ready to go.
He got really excited when I told him he gets to have medicine.
I tried to prepare Austin for what was coming. I told him they were going to make him fall asleep and when he wakes up his tongue is going to hurt just like Daddy's leg hurts. He really did seem to understand. The hardest part was having the nurse tell me after all the paperwork was done and he was changed into his hospital gown, "Ok, hand him over to me and you can leave through that door." Excuse me, what? It was so sad handing the nurse by little baby while he is screaming and then having to hear him scream all down the hallway. I wished they had told me about that part a little sooner so I could have prepared Austin (and myself). But the anesthesia quickly put him under and the procedure took maybe 15 minutes and then when he woke up they came and got me. They told me to be prepared if he woke up screaming and thrashing like some kids do but Austin was really calm and just told me his mouth hurt.
As soon as we got home we did his two favorite things, drank juice and watched Cars. He just cuddled with me and told me every once in a while his mouth hurt. But overall he is recovering great and this is what most of our day today looks like.
