The Offending Sliver

The offending sliver!

So most of you know a week ago little Layna went in for a little trip to the operating room. Full-blown, general anesthesia, operating room, surgical procedure.

The whole thing seemed a little...dramatic... for a sliver, don't you think?

I mean, she'd already had that thing in there for a MONTH. Seems like they could have just numbed it up with a local and yanked the thing out of there, right?

Nope, apparently not. Seems the infection that had been festering for so long without being able to move it toward the skin it needed to be washed out. Even with the ultrasound to let the good doc know where it was he still had to fish around in there a while to get it out.

Nicely embedded, in other words.

For some reason, whenever Elayna would talk about her "poisonous pus" I would think of that scene in Summer Magic where Hayley Mills tells "Miss Julia" about the wildlife in the backwoods near the Yellow House in Beulah. "Snakes?", Julia asks. "Oh naturally.", answers Nancy (Mills) "But only about 1 out of 10 is poisonous, so when we get bit we just have a slug of whiskey." "Even Peter!", adds brother Gill.

And then I'd remember the story of Shadrach the great Golden Retriever who had his mouth, face, and throat full of porcupine quills one summer and the best way to remove them all was to get the poor pup wasted and wait till he passed out after swerving to miss the pole a few times and then finally smacking into it head on. His rock hard doggie head still probably hurt from all that when he woke up!

So... where was I going with all that? Oh yes, never fear, we did NOT resort to such irresponsible-parent tactics as dosing our 4 year old with a thimble-full of moonshine. We just sent her in to be put under by the doctors. No risk in that at all, right?!

Okay, okay, I must admit, I am very glad as a mom to be able to offer this sort of humane procedure to my kid, as opposed to holding them down and lancing it as a doctor would have done 100 years ago.

Poor little girlie had already been through enough poking around her foot with needles, tweezers, squeezing and even a (weak) attempt to open it up with *gasp* a sterilized razor blade. Every night she had a bandage with black salve to draw it out, every day she went back and forth between epsom salt soaks and charcoal poultices. Nothing was working.

And y'all are probably thinking... ewww. TMI!

And y'all are right, but just wanted to show how long and how hard we tried to resolve this on our own outside of the OR!

Now there's a picture to wrench a mother's heart!
In pre-op just before they came to get her.

What it looked like the morning of surgery.

She's doing very well now. She had to wear a special protective boot, keep it wrapped in gauze and completely dry for a week, but now we're good to go with just a band-aid and some neosporin! Thank you, Lord!

with her cousin Levi at campmeeting,
walking around with her special boot and walking sticks, of course!
Thank you to Levi's mom for taking this adorable pic!