Surgery… Postponed.

Wendy’s surgery has been postponed. Surprisingly, it has nothing to do with insurance issues. Dr. Wulkan was looking at the results from Wendy’s distal colostogram (the procedure where they put a catheter in her stoma and ran dye through her intestines and took X-rays) and he noticed she has an extremely high imperforate anus (which pretty much means the parts of her intestines that need to be pulled down and connected to her anus is scrunched up in the top of her tummy).


Dr. Wulkan called me himself and said we could either go ahead with the surgery as planned on Thursday, in which he would be doing a blind stick. He explained they would be guessing at where her muscles for her rectum ended. And since her’s goes up so high, it is not a 100% guarantee to be right.


Our other option was to postpone, reschedule at Scottish Rite, and use an MRI to assure the correct placement of her rectum. He explained this was a relatively new way of doing the surgery and Scottish Rite is the only hospital in the United States that is currently performing an anorectoplasty this way. I even found an article written by the surgeons talking about why this is a better and more accurate way of correcting an imperforate anus. http://www.jpedsurg.org/article/S0022-3468(09)00815-X/abstract


We decided to reschedule. As parents, we want Wendy to have the best possible chance to have a normal life, and we definitely don’t want her to have to live with a colostomy forever, so this surgery needs to be successful. The same surgeon will be doing it, it will just be done at a different location where they have MRI surgical suites. I will be talking to Beryl tomorrow (she does all of the scheduling, but she only works Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday) about setting up a new date.


I feel relieved that the surgery is not in two days. For some reason, I had a bad feeling about it. Now I feel much more relaxed and I have more time to get everything that needs to be done situated. Everything was being rushed and I had a week’s worth of things to do and only a day left to do it.


I’ve also started selling tutus on Etsy. Visit my store to check out my paintings and tutus.

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