Upcoming Surgery - Cleft Palate Repair (Palatoplasty)

After months of calls, we've finally succeeded in getting Cicily's next surgery scheduled. She will have a cleft palate repair and another laryngoscopy/bronchoscopy done on Tuesday Jan. 22 at Phoenix Children's.

Cicily's craniofacial plastic surgeon, Dr. Singh will be repairing her palate. Dr. Mancuso, Cicily's ENT will be performing the laryngoscopy/bronchoscopy to evaluate if her airway has improved at all.

As previously mentioned, Cicily's cleft palate is very wide. (She really has no roof of her mouth- you can see her nasal bone- it actually looks really "normal" if you didn't know what a palate should look like!) Dr. Singh will basically have to work magic to take enough existing tissue from her palate and stretch it, pull it all together and stitch it up to give her a roof to her mouth. This is pretty much a "one shot" deal. If the new palate forms any fistulas (holes), then it will be harder, if not impossible to repair it another time due to scar tissue being nearly impossible to stretch and work with. Therefore, our family would greatly appreciate prayers for Cicily and her doctors.

Surgery Report
The surgery went quite well and was much shorter than the expected 3 hours. Although, when you're waiting in a surgical waiting area, it's never short! Dr. Singh said she was able to get plenty of tissue for her palate. She did not expect to have any fistulas form. She did say there was a good chance of having to elongate her palate with a velopharyngeal flap (yeah, I had no clue what it was 6 months ago either - Wikipedia's a great friend!). But, that wouldn't happen until she's 4-5 and only if her speech is sounding too nasally. We'd just lump it in with another surgery, I'm sure she'll be having one around that time! Cicily's mouth looks completely different inside, her palate is so LOW and it's FULL of stitches. The day after surgery she kept moving her tongue all around trying to figure it all out.

The laryngoscopy showed that her airway has improved some more, but not phenomenally more. So, Wed we had a 3D CT scan done (a detailed x-ray of her whole head) and Dr. Singh will evaluate that to talk to us about good timing for a jaw distraction process.

Cicily's been an absolute champ of course. We stayed in the hospital one night and came home the next day. She's hardly required any pain medication, I keep giving it to her "just in case". Today Cis just wanted to play like normal with the exception of wanting Mommy snuggles a little more frequently. She learned really quickly how to play straight-armed, and it's hardly bothered her to wear her arm restraints.

Thanks so very much to everyone praying for and thinking of Cicily.

Day after surgery.

I removed her arm splints for some patty-cake playing. She started signing patty-cake in the pre-op room and remembered it through her sedation and operation until the next day!

(I was going to say the picture looks worse than it really was, but it doesn't, in some ways it actually looks better. ) BTW- if anyone is in need of a hospital gown, we were allowed to keep this one, in addition to 2 new stuffed animals Cicily's beautiful personality scored!