The Surgery

I should probably warn you that if a close-up photo of a repaired cleft palate will make your stomach queasy, you might want to skip this post..

Asher had his third appointment with the Cleft Team on August 19th. He has a new nice, wonderful doctor who will be performing the surgery on October 14th.
While we would have much rather prepared having his surgery done during this past summer, such a time as this and it will take place in just over a month and three days.
It's going to be a pretty intense surgery, with a myriad of different things going on inside of his mouth.

• First off, the expander you see in his mouth (on the left) will be removed. He's had the expander in for about 6 months now and every night we use the key to help the device expand his palate. Hopefully it's done its job and his mouth will be the right size!
• Next, they will be re-aligning his palate. I'm pretty sure this means re-opening the palate, re-aligning and then closing it back up again.
  
• Then will come the tough part- the bone graft. Although you can't see in these pictures clearly, there's a split in his gum line due to his clefts. The doctors will graft a piece of bone from his hip into that cleft to help with the future growth of his mouth. That's intense.

• And last but not least, they'll remove those HUGE tonsils he was blessed with! I think we'll all enjoy having those removed since he's the loudest snorer in the family!

What does Asher think of all of this? Well, I think he understands what will be happening since he's been through this before and we've been talking about it a lot lately. I'm sure he's a little nervous, scared and anxious-who wouldn't be? He's not very emotional (at all) and still has a bit of a wall built up around him, so he won't let us see that side of him. I don't know what his surgeries were like before, or if he has any memory of them. (They were done at age 1 and 4.) Unlike his other surgeries, we will be there for him through it all and I hope that will make a difference to his nerves. He won't be alone through this one.

So for now, we wait and prepare ourselves and Asher for this big event.