Hannah--pre-surgery

Hannah went in for cleft palate repair on Monday. In addition, she had her ears fixed up. I'm putting a few more pre-surgery pictures on this post.

The Ear Nose Throat doctor went in first and got a great deal of fluid out of her ears and put tubes in to help dry them out. He said her ear drums were retracted (pushed in / flattened) from all of the fluid and that he thought she probably couldn't hear more than at about 30 decibals. He felt like her hearing issues were probably due to the fluid build-up and that when she's finished with her ear drops, we should see some dramatic differences. We're already starting to notice changes in how she responds when we say her name. She'll probably need several sets of tubes over the course of her childhood, which is very common with cleft babies.

The plastic surgeon went in next and took about 3- 3 1/2 hours to repair the bilateral, complete cleft. He felt like the surgery went very well and she's recovering nicely. They had to put a suture through her tongue and sort of cage it up so she wouldn't mess with the work that had been done. Thankfully, he removed that suture before we went home. By the time she got that out and her I.V. out, she was feeling a bit better. Today she was up walking around, playing with the other kids. She's on a liquid diet for a week, then soft foods for a week.

Our plastic surgeon was telling us that he had been in Tanzania, Africa with a group from his church repairing cleft palates on kids there. He said he had to look pretty hard to find a piece of paper after the surgeries to document what he had done. The next day he was just hoping that he'd be able to find that same piece of paper to look at what he'd documented. Quite a difference from the loads of paperwork required in the US!