Friday, December 13, 2013

Surgery next Tuesday

Emily's follow up appointment with the surgeon was this morning. About 20% of the tissue from the cheek flap is dying (it's turning a lovely black color and does not smell good...avoid getting close to Emily's face for the next few days ;)). The discussion was whether we should go ahead and do another surgery to remove the dead tissue and possibly do a tongue flap or just wait and see what happens with the dying tissue. The problem is as the tissue continues to die it will start sloughing off into her mouth, and she will have not only a lot of mouth odor but flaps of dead skin hanging down from the roof of her mouth. I'm thinking that won't be so pleasant for Emily...or the rest of us.

So the surgeon is going to go in and remove the dead/dying tissue. If the tissue underneath is sufficiently healthy and appears to be covering the opening in her palate, he will stop after removing the tissue. If, after removing the tissue, he determines that she still has an opening in her palate, he will cut a small flap from her tongue and sew her tongue to the roof of her mouth. The flap will remain attached to her tongue (like the cheek flap is currently) to give the tissue a good blood supply until it grows into the other tissue on her palate. Her tongue will be sewn to the roof of her mouth for three weeks.

Thankfully this will be a shorter surgery (1.5 to 2 hours) than the first one (almost 5!) and I'm hoping she will have an easier time after the anesthesia. Vomiting continually for 24 hours with your tongue sewed to the roof of your mouth sounds amazingly miserable.

1 comment:

CrossRiver Media said...

Poor Emily. The does sound amazingly miserable! do they give her anything for the nausea before the surgery? I always wake up with nausea after surgery as well and a kind nurse finally told me they could give me something pre-surgey to help. (That is when we figured out that the one nausea medication wouldn't work (only made it worse) and the one that started with a Z would work for me.) It has made ALL the difference!