Palate Repair Surgery Tomorrow!

Chun Le is scheduled for her palate repair surgery tomorrow morning at Good Samaritan Hospital with Dr. Daw. Dr. Reddy, her ENT, will also be inserting ear tubes before Dr. Daw gets started on his part of the surgery. It is pretty common that cleft kids have ear tubes put in as a result of their cleft anatomy which cuases fluid in the ears at all times. The fluid, as in Chun Le's case, can get easily infected (especially with the wide open palate). We decided to postpone putting in ear tubes until this surgery rather than having them put in during her January 31st lip repair. At that time we were not sure if she really needed them. Now that she has been with our family for 6 months and has had a handful of ear infections, one of which was very severe and caused her eardrum to rupture, and she has been diagnosed with very mild hearing loss as a result of the fluid in ears it was clear that having ear tubes would benefit her. For those of you who have never seen inside Chun Le's mouth here is a picture of what her quite wide bilateral cleft palate looks like: Here is another picture of how her lip is healing up so nicely now that she is almost 5 months post lip repair. Dr. Daw did an excellent job and we are hopeful and prayerful that he will have the same success with her palate repair tomorrow. Please pray with us for a successful palate repair! He will be making an incision all around the upper gumline on the inside of her teeth(along the edge of the roof of her mouth...hard to describe with words) and then aligning the muscles in the soft palate area to be the proper direction and using some part of her inside of nose cavity (I forget the official name) to help pull the palate together and suture it. He will also have to close off her nasal cavity before he closes off the palate. Her cleft as you can see in the photos goes from her teeth all the way to the back where her throat begins so it is a big surgery. Dr. Daw said that because her cleft is quite wide there is about a 20% chance that she will develop what is called a fistula (hole) in the roof of her mouth where the closure comes apart. This typically happens sometime during the 2-6 week post operation timeline. If this does happen, Chun Le will need to have the palate surgery repeated next summer. :( Please pray with us for complete repair with no fistulas if that is God's will for Chun Le. You can also pray that Phil and I will know how to comfort and encourage Chun Le during what you can imagine is going to be a tough recovery. The doctor expects that we will be in the hospital for two overnights. If pain management is under control and other factors are going well, we plan to be home sometime on Thursday. Thank you family and friends for your thoughts and prayers. OH....here are a couple of photos taken yesterday of us having some family fun time at the Bolingbrook Village picnic. It is one of the highlights of the summer for our big kids and Chun Le enjoyed her first pony ride and paddle boat ride too.