Surgery 101

Griffith is going in for surgery tomorrow morning. Right now he is on the schedule for 8:50, but he isn't the first case so he could get delayed or, I suppose, get bumped up earlier (unlikely, but possible.) At any rate, we met with the surgeon late this afternoon and it may not be a bad thing that we got delayed from last Thursday. I would love to be that much further down the line, but with the additional time has come a change in plans. Griffith has had intermittent symptoms with his belly -- he'll swell up and be uncomfortable for a while and then he'll be better. He'll poop fine for a while, then he won't. This really isn't how he should behave if he had a stricture. If he had a stricture then he should pretty much have symptoms and they shouldn't get better. The working theory is that it may relate to his right inguinal hernia (he also has an umbilical hernia). Sometimes his bowel drops a loop through the hernia and some times it isn't there. Dr. Joe proposes to go in through his belly button and fix the right inguinal hernia. Then he is going to do a scope of the small intestine to see if he can locate a stricture. If he looks and doesn't find any thing, then he may just end it there and be through with it. Of course, if he finds something, then he has to make another incision and take care of it. There is the "third way" which is that he may not be able to tell enough with the scope to be satisfied that he has taken care of the problem so he may have to go in and check things out visually and manually. The report is that it could take any where from 2 to 6 hours, depending on what they have to do and how things go, but that taking a long time isn't necessarily indicative of level of complexity. For example, Dr. Joe may take a really long time to scope the bowel and decide that there is nothing to do there. He says that they will call us and let us know when they start the surgery and that they will call about every hour to let us know what they are doing and how things are going.
Jay and I are planning on going in early, early in the morning to get in a little holding time, then we will see where the day takes us. Keep us in your thoughts and prayers. Apparently, Saints Timothy, Charles Borromeo (go Flemingsburg!) and Wolfgang (go Markus!) are all in charge of the stomach and gastrointestinal issues. No promises on when, but we will update the blog as soon as we can.
(P.S. Allan is just fine. Only one child is allowed to act up at at time.)