That didn't happen, so today Dietrich had himself a wee surgery to open the duct.
Oh my was I nervous -- more about the anesthesia than about the actual procedure. (Two little boys we love have recently had heart surgery, so we recognize not having to worry about the procedure as a blessing.)
We got there early, so we killed about 30 minutes watching Thomas and charming the nurses. I initialed the problem eye, and the nurse gave Dietrich a quick dose of a sedative. Within about 10 minutes, he was calm and drowsy. Time to say goodbye. We placed him in a cute red wagon, outfitted with a fluffy pillow and a heated blanket, told him we loved him, and headed out to the waiting room. Meanwhile, he got anesthetized and had rods of increasing sizes pushed down his tear duct.
We won't know for sure if the probing worked for six weeks or so, but the doctor felt confident that it had. "A textbook case," she said. In her after-surgery meeting with us, she accidentally referred to Dietrich as a girl, apologized, and then continued to refer to him as a girl about 10 more times. To avoid an embarrassing moment, I tried to refer to him only by gender-neutral terms, such as "kiddo" and "our little one." I was quite thankful that she didn't show such signs of absentmindedness before the procedure.
Next time we saw Dietrich, he was coming-to in the arms of a nurse. We cuddled in bed, I sang to him, and he slowly woke up. He seemed more perturbed by the vital-signs monitor wrapped around his big toe than by his eye. We were warned not to let him rub his eye, but he hasn't tried to do so yet. Way to be a model patient, Dietrich!
