Round One Surgery Postscript: Dehiscence

Still just learning to walk and likely dizzy from pain medication, Henry teetered into the side of a wooden chair on Friday night, bumping exactly the worst possible place. When we picked him up the damage was obvious. Blood was coming from both inside corners of his mouth. Instantly, this sent us reeling, sick at the thought of what might be happening so soon after all that Henry had just gone through at the hospital. We reached our lead surgeon at his home and he advised us how to stop the bleeding. On a second call, after the bleeding stopped, he asked us to meet him in the morning so he could get a first hand look—just in case. Later in the night we noticed under the clean bandage we had placed across Henry’s lip that his stitched area was bulging and, worse, his right nostril had widened. Sure enough, the lip adhesion was coming apart. So early this morning, his dad rushed him to meet the surgeon at the emergency room while mom watched the girls, who had already spent the entire week either at friends' or with baby sitters. End result: all Henry’s interior palate area surgery appears to be holding up for now and we added antibiotics to his meds as a precaution.

However, the lip adhesion appears to have come undone almost completely. The result looks like a very painful wound, since we know the surgery exposed bone close by in his palate area behind the torn open lip work. Some of the torn lip tissue has a sort of hamburger quality and does not appear to be reuseable at least for now. Still, we are further along than we might have been otherwise with the palate-area surgical stages Henry will need to eventually gain speech, and it seems he can hear now.

Trying a third time is of course our only option for closing his lip; we are just unsure how soon (or exactly how at this point). It's a hard fact that trying your best often fails, which is why it’s always best just to keep trying. We know too that we're certainly not the first family to run into a complicated snag in working through something that requires long-term staged reconstructive surgery. It will probably help that Henry couldn't be more loved.