Now that Nathan was off ECMO, the doctors could focus on getting all his insides back inside.
Every couple of days or so, a surgeon would come in to Nathan's room and perform a "reduction" on Nathan's silo.
In other words, the surgeon would basically "squish" a portion of Nathan's guts back into his abdomen and then sew off the silo in order to prevent them from working their way back out.
They would then give him 2-3 days to rest and recover from the reduction. I'm sure you can imagine how awkward and painful it would be.
The whole process took about 2 1/2 weeks to get everything back inside. When they were finally able to get everything back inside, Dr. Scaife was finally able to close Nathan's wound.
For the first couple of days, it was red and very "angry looking." But Nathan's body responded very well once everything was finally inside and it began to heal very quickly. By the end of the month, they were also able to take out his chest tube, which was in to help drain fluid and blood that had been accumulating in his chest.
And so we came to then end of September. Nathan was not quite a month old. He had made it through 4 surgeries, including ECMO and he had miraculously gone nearly 20 days with a gaping wound that never got infected.
It was a relief to have made it through the month, but we knew that there was still a long road ahead of us still. We just didn't know how long -- or how emotionally excruciating it would be.
That was deffinately a different process of "reducing the silo" than I thought is was. I thought they actually opened him up every time. It is incredible how adaptive our bodies are (especially that of a newborn) to be able to handle the kind of trauma that his body went through and still function.
ReplyDelete