Surgery Scheduled!

Andrew's surgery is scheduled for April 8th at 8:00 am. I don't have a tremendous number of details right now. Out pre-op appointment is April 7th where they will do the bloodwork and give us instructions to prepare for surgery.

Attack of the Sickies!

It looks like sickness has attacked our house. Both of the boys are in bed right now, and there is a coughing duet going on in my house. Nathan was very mellow over the weekend, which is usually a sign he's getting sick. Matthew was fine this weekend, but now he's coughing too. He had baseball practice tonight, so we spent an hour in the park. I doubt being in the cold air helped either of them. Of course, it is still 53 degrees right now, so it probably wasn't too bad. Matthew really had to go to practice though. He hadn't been able to have one yet. He was supposed to practice a week ago Sunday and that got rained out. Then, he was supposed to practice last Friday evening, and that got rained out too! (Really, we are still having a drought here, really!) So, Saturday his coach got them together for some work in the batting cages. Yes, we have batting cages at our park. They're really just a fenced in area with netting. My $200 for baseball at work, I guess. He's made a lot of improvement over last year. His league is called t-ball, but each at bat starts with the coach pitching to them. After six pitches, then they hit off of the tee. It's helping them get ready for the next level where the coach will only pitch to them. Nathan's league just uses the tee. His league is the one where they don't keep score either. Matthew's league keeps score and has an end of the year tournament as well as all stars. Whew! Anyway, last year Matthew did a lot of hitting off of the tee and very little hitting of pitched balls. This year, it looks like he's doing much better hitting pitches. I realized though that he is really young for this league. Their cut off date is April 30th, so last year he was probably one of the youngest players on the team. This year, you can see the way that he has matured. Nathan's doing a lot better too. He's had two practices so far, and we haven't had any meltdowns yet! He's doing great with listening to his coach and waiting his turn. We also haven't had any fits when someone else gets to the ball before him. Maybe baseball will work out. I tried really hard to convince him that soccer was more his style, but he had none of it. He kept insisting that he wanted to play baseball. I guess he was right.

Latest Doctor's Visit

Well, for all of the worrying I did about the CT scan and how to feed Andrew and when to feed Andrew and how bad the traffic would be, things went relatively easy today! The hospital called yesterday and told us that they would not be sedating him they would do what's called a "feed and bundle" where I would feed him and then we'd let him drift off to sleep. But they didn't even do that. All they did was put a little sugar water on his pacifier and lay him in the machine. The headrest was a U-shape, so he wasn't able to move his head side to side. Plus, once they put the lead apron on the rest of him, it was so heavy, he couldn't have moved if he wanted to! The whole scan took about 3 minutes. Since it was only about 7:30, I waited at the hospital and fed him before I headed over to the doctor's office at 9:00. We waited there for about an hour and then saw the doctor. They were able to show us the scans on the computer right in the room. They were actually very fascinating! They did a scan of his brain to make sure that everything looked good there. The doctor said that everything looks fine. Then they showed us the scan of the sutures. The only one that is fused is the sagittal suture that runs from the center of his head straight back. All of the other sutures look fine.

For the surgery, the doctor will perfom what's called a modified pi procedure. If you're familiar with the math number pi, (which I can't type on the computer) it looks like a T with two stems. They'll cut out two strips of bone along each side of sagittal suture, then one across the front and another along the back. This site shows a really good picture of the cuts they will make. I don't think they'll add any wires, though. The doctor said the number of cuts really depended on how the skull reshaped itself as they were performing the surgery. The surgery will last about two hours, and he'll be in the hospital 2 or 3 days. He'll have an incision across the top of his head, but the doctor said they would use a plastic surgery tecnique to close the incision so there won't be too much scarring. Plus, he will, hopefully :), grow more hair that will cover it all up. We'll see the doctor two weeks after surgery, and if all is going well, we won't have to go back for another four months.

Which takes us to dates. It looks like we'll have the suregery the week of Spring Break (April 7th). The doctor thought waiting until the end of May was too long, and after he explained to us the post-op care, I'm comfortable with Spring Break. The skin incision will be partially healed by the time I go back to school, plus there's really very little post-op care. He probably will not need a helmet. The doctor said he might need a head band that will help push the front and back of his head together, but we won't know that until the two week visit. We'll wait to hear from the surgery scheduler, and when I have an exact date, I'll let everyone know!

By the way, I haven't gotten the poor child in for a picture yet, but here's one I took last Sunday. Knowing the way things go, it may be the only three - month one he gets!

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