Another Surgery

Here is the story of what happened to Matthew:

He woke up Tuesday morning at about 2 a.m. crying and as I picked him up he started to retch. ( What I mean by retching is gagging-dry heaving. He can not throw up due to a previous surgery.) So I got a bottle and let his G-tube vent into the bottle and what was coming out was not the right color. It had a brown tinge to it. Just knowing what to look for in CDH kiddos I knew brown was not good. He continued to retch 8 times in an hour. So I woke Jim up and we decided to take him into the ER. So we got Finn up at 3 a.m and we all got in the car and drove to the ER. We spent about 7 hours total in the ER with a 3 year old. Thankfully he did amazing. While in the ER they did an x-ray and blood work. X-ray showed what looked like a reherniation, so they immediately called surgery. They came down and said they were confident he had reherniated. They finally admitted him and then they did an upper GI on him to make sure what they were going to find when they got in there. Well the upper GI showed he had a esphoageal hernia. So his stomach had herniated into his esophagus. Needless to he definitely needed surgery AGAIN. Thank goodness it was not a rehernation of the diaphragm.  So he was scheduled for surgery on Wednesday at 9 a.m. They got him in to surgery at about 10:30 and he was in recovery by 12:30. The surgeon said " He was a tough case and had lots of scar tissue" He said he was a mess in there, which we already knew that from the surgeon who preformed his other surgeries. The next day was the worst for pain for him and the poor little guy was just miserable. They were giving him pain meds, but they didn't seem to really be working as well as we would have liked. They gave him some different meds the next day and he has seemed to be a lot more comfortable since then. Each day he is improving and feeling better. He passed some gas today so we are hoping they will start feeds tomorrow. Once feeds start and go through his system and he poos then we can go home. The said he is not a typical surgery case of need to make sure he can tolerate feeds, because we already know he can tolerate them since he has been for months already. 

So the procedure the surgeon is the same thing that Matthew had on a previous surgery. He had to go in and completely undo his Nissen Fundoplication and then redo it. Here is a link to what a nissen is again.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissen_fundoplication

He said instead of stitching on one side he stitched it to his own tissue and then stitched it on both sides in hopes that it will never have to be redone. I sure hope so too.

I just hope that this surgery fixes everything with his stomach. It has been a very active organ. It has been up next to his heart, then it traveled to adhere itself to his patch and now it wanted to see his esophagus. I am hoping that it has decided to behave itself. I don't want ANY MORE surgeries. I know that this is the future we face with having a CDH kid. You never know when something like this will happen. There are so many different scenerios that can happen, you just hope that they won't. It is not the most fun to have to always worry if they get sick or start acting a little off. It always make you think the worst. With Finn if he gets sick and is a little off you just chalk it up to him being sick. Matthew is a different story all together. He gets a cold and I worry he will end up in the hospital. He throws up and I worry he has a bowel obstruction, reherniated, or something else all together. I hate to say I live in constant worry, but I kind of do. It is not something I really enjoy, but it is our normal and I have embraced it for all it is worth and I have learned to know my boy inside and out and I know when something is not right. 

He had been acting a little off the last couple of months and I just could not put my finger on it. Now I know I need to trust my gut and when something is not quite right. I am thankful they got it figured out and he is on the mend now.

Thank you for all your thoughts and prayers they mean a lot to us.

Jaime