Surgery

We spent last Wednesday and Thursday in Indianapolis, Indiana. We ran between the Zoo and the Riley Outpatient Center (thankfully the two are only 1 mile apart!)

Megan had a study done on her kidneys to see how well they are functioning, given the fact that she has rather severe bladder reflux (urine flows up towards the kidneys instead of down and out). The doctor saw "hydroureters" and "hydronephrosis" (basically dilated ureters and fluid surrounding the kidney) and that the right kidney remained small. To him, this all indicated that there was scarring on the right kidney, and that the left kidney was even more at risk for infection and subsequent damage. He said there was only a 15% chance of her outgrowing this problem (bladder reflux is a rather common in children, and often can resolve without doing anything). He wanted to see if her kidneys were damaged from previous infections/problems and that's why we went down for the scan.

Well, it was obvious to me that the right kidney wasn't doing as well as the left on the scan. It turns out the right kidney is only working at 30% and it didn't take the doctor more than 10 seconds looking at it to suggest surgery. But, he left it up to us as to whether we wanted to wait, or perform a less invasive (and probably not as effective) procedure. We decided to go ahead and have him do the full surgery, which will entail giving Megan an incision much like a c-section cut, and opening her bladder and pulling the ureters down into the bladder and making a new and longer canal for them. He said he's only had 4 out of 1400 patients fail this procedure.

So, in October, Megan and I will head to Indy for four days for this surgery.

I'm not happy she has to have this done. I'm nervous, scared and a little sad. Not worried that she'll die (which is, of course a risk in the back of my head) but more worried about complications, and how she will be hurting after the surgery, and possible complications (infertility?)

I'll post the fun pictures another time, but for now I wanted to let people know what's coming our way in a few more weeks...