Slane update-spinal fusion

February 16, 2004

For those that are interested, just underwent another spinal

fusion for his congenital scoliosis. It took 3 surgeons, 11 hours,

and 9 days in the hospital, but he's doing well. They started

working on him at 8:00 a.m. on Jan 28th and didn't finish until 7:00

p.m. They had to fuse his spine both anterior and posterior. They

went in from the side to get to the front of the spine, had to take

1 rib out, collapse his lungs, and remove 5 discs to gain them

flexibility in strengthening it. That took about 5 hours, then they

started working on the back. They placed 2 rods, 4 hooks to hold

the rods, and 9 screws to support the fusion. All in all,

everything went well, but a very scary time for us all. Our goal

this time around was to get as much correction as possible out of

his back, plus prevent the curvature from getting worse. He was

almost at a 70 degree curve, and now he's just over 30. That's a

huge improvement for him. He spent 5 days in PICU and 9 days total

in the hospital. He's currently in a full body cast for 6-8 weeks,

and if all goes well, then will move into a back brace. So, for us,

we survived another storm with our -- this one being the

biggest by far. Words can't tell you how scared we were thru all

this, but my son takes it like a trooper and somehow gets us all

thru it. He's home, but doing very well, and next week should be

returning back to school.

While all this is going on, my kids officially turned 6 on February

9th. So, now we have 6 year old triplets (soon to be 16) living in

the house. We thru them a wonderful birthday party on Valentine's

Day because and Jen were troopers thru all this as well.

Cheryl

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