Saturday, July 9, 2011

Surgery update

Amelia had her surgery yesterday at ~230 pm. It has been quite a long time since her last sugery so we were worried about how difficult it would be to fast her all day. She couldn't have any solid food after midnight the night before so her 8:30 bottle was her "last meal". She had jello for breakfast and her last apple juice had to be finished by 11:00. She did surprising well :). We were able to distract her most of the day although it broke my heart to see her walking around the kitchen signing eat and I couldn't really explain to her why she couldn't have anything.

The first part of her surgery was with Dr. Kikkawa, her ophthalmologist. He and his team (he is an excellent surgeon and very well-known so he always has an entourage following him around) put a silicone tube in her left tear duct to help keep it clear. He also cut a small red piece of skin from her upper left eyelid that was left over from her earlier eyelid reconstruction. He was not able to go through her nostril to insert the tube since her nostril on that side is small and deformed so he ended up having to make ~ 1/4" incision on the bridge of her nose right next to the inner corner of her eye. It just needed a few sutures to close up the incision.

After the eye surgery Amelia was off to get a 3-D CT scan of her skull. Her neurosurgeon is checking to see if the holes in her skull are closing on their own. She has a small hole in the front of her skull (almost in the middle of her forehead). He is also checking to see if she is missing the bone between her nasal passage and her brain which helps protect her brain. I didn't even know we had a bone there and this is potentially very scarey and she will need to have a bone implant done if she is in fact missing it. For now I am chosing to believe that everything will be fine and the bones will grow on their own because I have enough to worry about at this time.

From there she was taken to a partial recovery room to have a heart ECHO done. This is a sonogram of her heart to see if the hole in her heart has changed at all. Her cardiologist thinks it is getting smaller just by listening to her heart but he wanted to take this opportunity to get a visual check. We should be hearing from him in about 1 week.

Finally, after 3 hours, they brought Amelia to recovery and we were allowed to see her. She was very confused and her eye looked worse than we expected but all in all she did great. Her nurse said she was a trooper and called Amelia "Stable Mabel" because her vital signs remained consistant the entire time. As usual, Amelia immediately tried to rip out her IV and was ready to eat. We are very fortunate that she does so well with anesthia because this is her 7th surgery (I think, honestly I have lost count).

While we were putting Amelia in the carseat to take her home we noticed that the tube was visible in her eye. It actually goes across the edge of her iris. We were not expecting that and thought the tube was coming out because she was blinking and crying and lots of blood was coming out. We ran back into the hospital and they had us page the ophthalmologist on call. We had a lot of trouble getting a hold of him because of bad cell phone reception. After about a 1/2 hour we decided to just go home. He called after we were on our way and said the tube is usually visible but only about 1 mm in your eye. After we got home and calmed down, I remembered that because of her malformed eyelids her tear duct on that side is much further towards the middle of her eye than usual so we think everything is ok. Hopefully it won't affect her vision in that eye since it is already her weaker eye and the tube needs to stay in for 3 months.
Today Amelia is almost back to normal. She is sleepier than usual and a little more "clingy" but we are always surprised at how quickly she recovers from such a big ordeal.

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