Zoe's First Follow Up Procedure

The surgery team is changing Zoe's dressing today. As we mentioned before, they left her abdomen "open" after her surgery because putting everything in its proper place right away could cause too much pressure to build up in her belly. The wound is nice and covered and mom and dad can't see it when we're visiting with her, but we can definitely see the dressing, which is referred to as a silo. The silo involves a plastic covering a bunch of adhesive and gauze and some tubing. While it may sound quite routine to change a dressing, at Zoe's age it's a pretty big deal. Surgery turns her room into a mini OR and the anaesthesia team is there to help monitor her pain. Basically, any time they go in and start moving things around, there is a risk that they can jeapordize her stability. Also, even though they give Zoe lots of medications so she is well sedated, she still wiggles around a lot and senses people are in her room--at least that's what she was doing right before they kicked us out.

So, since we've been kicked out. . . we are just sitting in the hallway waiting for a report from the surgeon that all went well. Hopefully he will be out momentarily with good news.

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Yay!! The surgeon says everything went well. They changed the dressing and closed a portion of the wound. They would have closed the whole thing today, but they felt like it would be better to do it in two steps. So, they'll come back next week and do the whole thing again. While we don't like our little girl to have to have so many surgical procedures, we'd rather the doctors be more gentle than aggressive, so we're perfectly fine with their plan.

We are so proud of our little girl and we will never get tired of hearing the doctors tell us how amazing she is. We'd love to post a picture of her but we decided to wait until her dressing is gone--we just think she may want a little privacy. :)

As for her sister is concerned--we're happy to report that she gained some weight tonight. She lost a bunch of weight after she was born, which is normal for babies, but the docs weren't so happy that she hadn't started gaining any. After a few adjustments to her food and the addition of some protein powder, we're thrilled to report that she's finally trending upwards, i.e., getting a little fatter. We're also thrilled to report that we're now regularly getting skin to skin time with her, and mom, dad, and Sadie couldn't be happier!