They Are Just Wrapping Up

About 20 minutes after the page Dr. Sires emerged from the OR to meet us. He said things went great. He was able to use the tarsal grafts to prop up that lower lid. This, in addition to the canthopexy procedure, should eliminate the slanted appearance to her eyes (which was really more tissue related). He said he shortened the upper eyelid. ??! That wasn't in the pre-op consent form. You can bet I'll be eager to see what that means. He shortened the levator muscle, the one that lifts the upper lids. As is often the case for patients with ptosis, her muscle contains a lot of fatty tissue which is why it doesn't work very well. 

We will wait and see the results from this surgery. This may be good enough, or she may require a frontalis sling as the final step in correcting the ptosis. Yes, we knew that. It will be about 2 weeks before we can really get a good idea of the result, though I'm sure she is going to look really different right away, and 6 months before all is really settled and with the scarring and all and we can see the final result.  The scary part is over.

We are so seasoned now that 4 inch incisions on the legs and removing metal plates seems like no big deal. Crazy. Shortly meeting with Dr. Sires, Dr. Song paged us to meet him. Again all went well for the ortho team. There was a little fluid in the right leg, oddly the opposite of the one that had been bothering her the most, likely in response to the plate. They removed some of the keloid scarring and used the adhesive type closure. He said that part of the itching may have more to do with the hardware than the keloid and unfortunately the keloid may return (which I knew as patients that tend to form keloids, well...tend to form keloids). We'll be hoping it doesn't come back but it very well might. The last ones formed many months later so it will be a long time before we'll know for sure. Ultimately I just want her to be comfortable since something about those incisions has been really irritating to her for awhile now.

As I type this they are probably doing the brain MRI. We'd like to see how her cerebellum looks now that she's older and bigger, and since the two prior scans that were taken when she was a baby were different from each other. In addition it will be nice to see if everything else is in her brain developing normally.  There probably won't be anyone to read it for us, so we may not know for weeks but I'll post about that when I know.

We are waiting for her to come out of recovery and it always takes a long time to get your room assignment. 

I CAN'T WAIT TO SEE HER!