Deacon's Surgery

To make sure we have this down somewhere I wanted to make sure i put Deacon's surgery on here.  Before he was born we knew that he had too much fluid in one of his kidneys and that we would have to get it checked out after he was born, it's not uncommon for that problem to just resolve on it's own after a baby is born.  So when he was about 3 weeks old he had his first ultrasound and found that he still had too much fluid on one of his kidneys, so the next step was to figure out why.  Sometimes there is just reflux and the liquid goes back up into the kidney after his first very unpleasant test, that was ruled out. Next they look for a blockage that require more unpleasant tests. For this particular test, a renal scan, they sand bag him down and inject him with a radioactive dye and then flush it out to watch the glow for 45 minutes and take pictures of his body every 15 seconds and see how it goes out of the body, that's how they were able to tell that exactly what was going on with his body and they discovered that the top of his ureter is narrow and that it causes it to drain at a very slow rate.  They also could tell that his kidney functioned fine, which was a relief. He had to have lots of ultrasounds and this done 2 times, here he is getting his last scan.
 

this picture isn't very clear but the bigger dot on the left side is his left kidney that wasn't working right and the smaller on the right is good one. it shows how much faster things drained from the right kidney then the left.  By the end of the test, everything would be gone from the right and the left would look the same.  

 

 

 

 

 Once they knew the problem the doctor suggested we wait until he was closer to 1 and see if by chance there was any improvement and if there wasn't that they would need to operate to fix the problem. On his 1st birthday he went back for the tests again and found that he had actually gotten a little worse so they thought we should for sure do the surgery and that the longer we waited it would be more likely to lessen his kidney function, so we scheduled his surgery for August 30th.

Here he is playing waiting for them to call us back.

His surgery took 2+ hours and all they did was go in and cut out the narrow part and reattach it to his kidney. While they were in there they found out that the ureter was kind of routed wrong around nerves and things they had to fix that as well. After his surgery i got to go back and be with him until he moved to recovery, he did so well that they moved him in practically no time. He was so thirsty and drank these bottles so fast, part of the reason they let him go because he was doing so well. He was so sweet and once he woke up enough to notice us he just wanted to be held even though it was kind of awkward  with all the cords and tubes. I don't like these pictures but this is what he looked like after his surgery and a few hours afterwards. 

 Overall he did great, we got to Primary's at 6 in the morning and we were on our way home by 12, we were so shocked, he did so awesome that they were fine with him going home so quickly.  For this surgery they typically have to stay one night but his doc thought he would be a good candidate for outpatient and I am so glad he did because he would have been miserable at the hospital since he felt fine.For a week after his surgery he had to have a tube that drained out of his back and that was kind of a challenge because it was GROSS and because he had to wear two diapers, we kept him in a onesie at all times so that he wouldn't be able to pull on it. Here he is later in the day after his surgery for the first BYU football game.  We couldn't believe how well he did, I was hoping he would want to be extra cuddly and sit with me all day but he wanted to play like normal.  It was only about the time he was due for his first pain medicine that he acted cranky but once he got it he fell right asleep and was the same little boy after that.

 He recently had his follow up ultrasound to see if there has been any improvement and it already showed that there was a great decompression which is exactly what we wanted and as of now the doctor said no more follow ups or tests. We are so happy to have this all behind us and very thankful for his doctor, we were very lucky and loved him. He was great.