Bryce is resting comfortably after his 8AM surgery. The procedure took about an hour and a half, but he was sedated the entire time. There were no complications during the operation, but we won't know whether it had any positive effect for two weeks, and he won't be out of the woods until mid-September at the earliest.
They had to put him back on a ventilator to keep him breathing while he was anesthetized, but Children's uses a flexible ventilator tube that looks much more comfortable, and they'll switch him back to the nasal cannula when he's a little less groggy. The doc says he'll have a splitting headache when he comes around, which will likely be compounded by the fact that he hasn't eaten in nearly 12 hours, but otherwise he looks great. The topmost picture is before and the bottom is after.UPDATE: After looking back on the weekend's posts, I realized that I had yet to share Bryce's formal diagnosis. For the more medically-inclined (or just curious), Bryce has stage 3, zone 1 aggressive posterior retinopathy of prematurity (APROP) plus disease/threshold. Also, several people have asked why they didn't catch this earlier. After doing some more reading, it seems that the aggressive variant of ROP (which Bryce has) does not follow the typical pattern of gradual degradation: instead, it rapidly transitions from normal vascularization to total retinal detachment. So, we're actually thankful that the opthamologist at UMMC caught it when she did! Print this post
No comments:
Post a Comment