Surgery Updates and New Surprises

I am sorry that it's taken so long to update you on Elise's surgery.  I did check in on Facebook...but I realize that I should have done so here.  The time change has been very hard on our house...Very hard, indeed.

Elise did very well with her surgery.  Thanks, I am confident, to your prayers. 

I will say that going in was rough.  She was hungry, and she doesn't like to be hungry.  But she was in fairly good spirits even so, until she realized what was about to go down.  We managed to be lightly irritable, but cooperative through triage, weigh in, and changing to the surgical gown.  She spat the bronchial and vaso-dialator (veins) all over everywhere, and got us all sticky.  But even that went okay until they took us back to the operating room.  We got about 50 feet from the room when she realized what was about to go down.  It took us all of 15 minutes to get her the rest of the way down the hallway and onto the table.  I am pretty sure a couple folks got kicked, even though I tried to warn them.  I strained my back, but got her there.  I did, in fact, have to hold her down to receive the anesthetic gas...and talked sweetly to her until she fell asleep.  I apologized to the nurse that I was pretty sure got kicked and she told ME that she appreciated ME!  She said that I handled her perfectly, and that they appreciated my understanding...I have never in 9.5 years gotten that.  Not once.  It was crazy.  I was quite touched.

Because she had rather poltergeist-y moments as reactions to the anesthesia in the past, I requested an exit dose of Zofran (anti-nausea medicine) to prevent those moments this time.  It worked beautifully.  As a matter of fact, she felt so well, she barely had her eyes open before she started about ripping out her IV.

I chose to keep her on the Zofran for about 36 hours.  She had a couple of gag-y coughs Saturday morning, but they passed with no production.  Thank God!!  The funny thing about the Zofran was that it worked so well they released her overly quickly because they didn't need to see if she could keep anything down, because it saw to that.  And so she danced drunkenly down the hall and giggled uproariously all the way home.  (It was a very nice contrast to the scrubbing up of vomit from last time!!)

The ear tubes went in smoothly.  We are stuck with the regular ones, we do not have the choice to get the T-tubes that can be sewn in, because her actual ear tubes are so minuscule they cannot get them in.  Period.  So we are praying over this batch to stay in a long as possible!!!  9 months seems to be her average, but they could stay in for a shorter or longer amount of time.

The laryngoscopy was to see if she had scar tissue from previous intubations.  The good news is that no, there is not any scar tissue.  Which is really great...and I am incredibly thankful, because that is the kind of thing there can really be nothing done to fix.  Which means that, not only does Elise have no scar tissue, but that her asthma is true asthma, and can be treated and we can expect a response from her body.  Scar tissue will not respond, and could possibly deteriorate and become worse.

The surprise news is that she has reflux.  Still?  Again?  We are not sure.  We will begin treating it for about a month and see if there is impact in her stomach aches or her sleep restlessness.  She also has inflamed and enlarged vocal chords.  And all of the blood vessels in her esophagus and vocal chords are enlarged and appear to be under pressure.

We are not completely sure what this means.  It could be because she is so gutturally vocal.  She grunts, growls, shrieks, screams...and while you certainly understand her emotions, her throat is paying the price.  They have a lot of abnormal pressure put on them.  Of course, it could be completely unrelated.  And so, we have something new to watch.  Hooray.

All in all, it went as boring and painlessly as we had a right to hope for.  Thank you for holding her up in prayer.  As I said, I am quite sure that it was entirely why it went so well!