Preparing for Surgery

Yesterday, Jason and I had a couple of meetings with different doctors only to find out that Matthew is going to need surgery this Thursday. The surgery is scheduled for Thursday at 1:00 pm. He is going to need laser surgery on his eyes. They have not reached the "plus" stage yet but the doctor feels that they will be there any day because they progressed so rapidly for the worse in the last five days. The left eye which was the better one has also progressed so rapidly that it turns out the doctor may end up doing laser surgery on both of his eyes. This is a rare surgery that they have to perform and the doctor said that of the 300 babies he has seen at Valley Medical, Matthew will be the first one he will do there. This doctor has done the surgery with other babies, but just not at Valley Medical Center. There are only two other doctors in the U.S. that could perform this kind of surgery and one is located in Los Angeles and the other in Detroit. Thank God for living in the Bay Area!

In addition to the laser surgery, the doctors are thinking they will go ahead and perform surgery on his intestines. We just found out that the gastrograffin enema he had last week showed he does have a stricture, or narrowing, in part of his intestines. They still need to do the upper GI test on him to see if there are any other areas with narrowing in the small intestines. They may do it today before surgery on Thursday. The intestinal surgery will consist of cutting out that portion of the intestine that is constricted and then sew the two pieces of intestines back together if they are able to. If the intestines are inflamed or they are not healthy enough to sew back together, then they will connect his intestines to a colostomy bag until the intestines have healed enough to sew back together. At the same time as doing all this, the doctors are debating whether or not to go ahead and do the liver biopsy since he'll be put under anyway and it allows the doctors to see the liver better and in doing it this way it is less likely to cause excessive bleeding or damage to the liver. Unfortunately, Matthew's platelet count is low and he may not clot very well. (The platelets help with the clotting that is needed when you get cut open)

The downside to all of this is that even though they do the surgeries on Thursday that doesn't mean it is a fix all. We found out yesterday that he may end up having multiple surgeries on his eyes and intestines. Jason and I were under the impression that once you had the surgery everything was better and that was the end of that, but the doctor's mentioned that with his eyes, more of the bad blood vessels could still continue to grow after the old ones were lasered and that he could potentially need a second surgery. With regards to the intestines, scarring could occur or another stricture could form in the same area, so they would need to go back in and do the same kind of surgery again.

So what does all of this mean? We don't really know...all we do know is that if he doesn't have the eye surgery he will go blind for sure and if he doesn't have the instestinal surgery, then he won't ever be able to eat food again because he couldn't pass it along. We were also told that some babies have had to stay in the hospital for as long as a year because of intestinal problems and repeated surgeries. Either way, Matthew won't be able to have breastmilk for several more weeks and will continue to be fed intraveneously. Since the IV lines they put in his head didn't go as deep as they thought, this means they will have to perform another type of surgery on him on Tuesday to put in a deep line that will last a long time for his IV feedings.

I know God certainly knows the timing of everything and I believe He helped prolong the eye surgery the last few weeks because of the intestinal infection or whatever he had was going on. I believe God knows best on whether or not the doctors should do all the surgeries at once, or if they need to do them separately. Please pray that God gives the doctors the wisdom they need to make the right decisions about performing these multiple surgeries. Pray that God gives them plenty of rest and that He guides their hands during the procedures. Pray that these surgeries will fix the problems with his eyes, intestines and liver completely and that they won't have to do a second surgery. Pray for Matthew to have the strength he needs to endure these procedures and that he recovers just fine without complications from them all. Pray that he will not bleed out when they do the surgeries. Please continue to pray for us to have the peace that everything will be fine in the long run, no matter what the outcome is. Thank you all for your support.