Adjusting after surgery.
The strangest part about the days after surgery is how normal everything has felt. I’d braced myself for pain, for rough nights, for tears, for that helpless feeling you get when your child hurts and you can’t fix it. I’d gone into it imagining the worst and preparing for whatever that might look like. But honestly, the only real disruption so far has been the fact she decided to start teething like her life depended on it. As if surgery wasn’t enough for one week, she suddenly thought it was a great time to pop 3.5 teeth through in two days. Typical.
Maybe it’s wild luck, or maybe it’s just who she is, but the teething almost distracted her from any discomfort she could have had from the operation. Instead of guarding her legs or crying from the casts or acting sensitive when we moved her, she was basically on a personal mission to bite anything in reach. My fingers, her comforter, her bottle, the air, her own tongue. Anything. And honestly, between teething gel and her determination, she powered through it.
Watching her, it was like she’d divided her focus: legs healing over here, teeth exploding through gums over there, and somehow she just handled everything at once without drama. Meanwhile, I was the one pacing around the house like a stressed-out meerkat, checking her temperature every ten minutes, expecting a meltdown that never came.
We weren’t even a week out when I realised we’d been waiting for symptoms that never arrived. No high pain sensitivity, no lack of movement, no hesitancy with the casts. Nothing. The only thing she cared about was her gums. Every photo from these first post-surgery days is her either gnawing on something or smiling with her little swollen mouth, looking like she’s proud of her half-visible new teeth.
She’s always had this way of surprising us. We think we know how things will go, and she turns around and rewrites the script. Surgery day was full of tension and fear and that horrible waiting feeling, but once we brought her home, she just settled. It’s almost confusing when you’re expecting struggle and instead you get quiet strength and stubbornness in the form of teething rage.
I keep saying it, but she copes better than we do. She has her little moments where she whinges or gets frustrated, but honestly, if I’d had half the week she had, I’d be milking it for sympathy for months. She gives herself about six seconds and then moves straight into whatever she wants to do next.
These casts were supposed to slow her down, but she still tries to wriggle, roll, and half crawl. It’s like she hasn’t accepted that she’s meant to take it easy. And every time she lifts her legs or knocks them together, I find myself holding my breath, waiting for her to react, but she doesn’t. She keeps going. She’s been eating fine, drinking fine, sleeping how she usually does when she’s teething, and being her cheeky, determined little self.
The best part is how quickly she settled back into her normal routines. I thought nights would be rough, but mostly it’s been normal waking for teething, not pain. I can’t tell you how relieved we were, especially after everything that led up to this surgery. You prepare yourself for a storm and get a light drizzle instead, and the sense of relief hits harder than you expect.
Two days after surgery, she was lying on the couch with her bottle, blinking slowly with her half-asleep, half-overtired look, and I just stared at her thinking, that’s it? That’s the big scary recovery process we’ve been dreading? This tiny human is stronger than all of us combined.
The truth is, we know pain might still show up here and there as things settle, but right now, she’s handling the adjustment like she handles everything else: quietly, stubbornly, and with a level of resilience that leaves adults embarrassed about how dramatic we are.
Every time I look at her, I’m reminded why we keep pushing forward, appointment after appointment, cast after cast, sleepless night after sleepless night. She doesn’t just get through things; she teaches us how to get through them too. She doesn’t let us fall apart. Not because she tries to, but because watching her makes it impossible to complain.
We’re not even a week out, but it feels like she carved her own path through recovery before we even had time to process the fear of surgery day. And now that I’ve seen how she’s coping, the weight on my chest has lifted in a way I can’t properly explain. I didn’t realise how tightly I’d been holding everything until I finally exhaled.
So here we are: adjusting after surgery, except not really adjusting to the surgery at all. Mostly adjusting to her mouth full of sudden new teeth and trying to keep up with a baby who refuses to be slowed down by anything. I keep checking her legs and expecting signs of struggle, but the truth is, she’s more bothered by the fact she can’t chomp on the remote control.
If anything, these days after surgery have just reinforced something I already knew: she’s tougher than she looks, stronger than anyone ever gave her credit for, and built with this wild, quiet courage that feels far bigger than her tiny body. I’m watching her navigate all of this without fear, and I’m realising she’s ready for whatever comes next. She’s not asking for special treatment, sympathy, or softness. She just wants her bottle, her cuddles, and a good object to bite.
We’re still keeping an eye on everything, still prepared in case she needs something, still aware that healing takes time, but for now, she’s showing us that life doesn’t have to stop just because something big happened. She’s showing us that adaptation can be simple.
If you asked me to describe the adjustment period after surgery, I’d probably laugh, because it hasn’t really been an adjustment for her at all. It’s been an adjustment for us. The shift from fear to relief. The shift from imagining worst-case scenarios to watching her prove them wrong. The shift from preparing for hardship to accepting that sometimes things really do go better than expected.
She’s fine. Better than fine. She’s determined, teething, and taking on the world one sleepy bottle at a time. And honestly, I think that’s all we could’ve hoped for.