Surgery Date

It is set: Emma will be having her cleft lip and ear surgery done on August 26, 2009.

Yesterday Jason was able to go with me to Albuquerque for Emma's Dr. appt with Dr. Cuadros. He will be the doctor who will be performing Emma's cleft lip surgery. Thankfully enough, they like to do the ear surgeries at the same time, so Dr. Horn will perform her surgery on her ears the same day. Yay! I felt really comfortable with Dr. Cuadros; according to him, the surgery will take all together take about 3hrs. He will for sure do the left side of the cleft. She has a very minor bilateral cleft lip;meaning, the cleft is on both side of the lip

(Can you see from looking at her, the right side wanted to form into a cleft, but just barely started?)

We have to report to Dr. Cuadros on Tues afternoon for a pre-op appointment and then we will stay the night in Albuquerque and be at Presbyterian Hospital at 6am. The day of surgery is going to be such a long day! She will have to stay in the hospital over night and if she is recovering pretty well, we will be able to go home the next day... If she is still a little out of it, we might have to stay an extra night.

I questioned about her feedings; because of the pressure from the bottle onto her lips, we will have to feed her with a syringe or something like that. This will last for a week, thankgoodness! With the stitches on her lip, they don't want her to irritate them, so I believe she will have to have some sort of brace around her arms to where she can't touch her face. I can't imagine the nights we will be having!

Once the week is up, we will have go back to Dr. Cuadros office or the Hospital, not for sure yet, have him put emma under anesthia one more time via face mask and then take out her stitches. Apparently, these stitches don't come out on there own and because he said the stitch is so small I guess he is going to need special tools to get them out.

They showed us pictures of before and after babies, they performed the surgery on, who were born with cleft lips and I have never seen one before and I was totally amazed. Some babies, you could see the scarring, and other babies you couldn't even tell they had a cleft lip. I wonder what Emma is going to look like after the surgery!

When Dr. Horn performs the surgery in her ears, he will be putting tubes, I believe in her ear drums to relieve some pressure and help her hear and understand words better so it doesn't affect her speach. The tubes will then fall out on their own. Some people have told me it has taken their kids years to fall out... We will see.

I am a little nervous about the whole process, but I do believe everything will work out for our good.

P.S. Dr. Cuadros said for sure he will be performing the surgery on the left side of her lip and he might do the right... If not, we will have to wait a year and get the right side done. I just say do both at the same time! Make it a little easier on me!