Another Day, Another Doctor

If you haven’t heard, we go to the doctor a lot.  This is a good thing because they are doing everything they can for our baby girl.  It’s also a good thing if you love to pee in cups.  Or get weighed with all your clothes and shoes on.  Or if you relish the comfort of the papered exam table with nowhere to put your feet and nothing to lean your pregnant aching back against while you wait for the doctor for 47 minutes reading the same poster over and over.  But I digress.   Point is, if you come to my house and it’s a mess, it’s because I spent FIVE HOURS in the doctor’s office yesterday, so try to withhold judgment.

We finally met with our Pediatric Surgeon at CHKD, and wow, I can’t say enough good things about him and about CHKD in general!  We are so blessed to have a nationally acclaimed children’s hospital a few miles from our door!  We got to visit the NICU, and everyone there was so warm and wonderful.  

Our surgeon surprised us by presenting a very conservative treatment plan for the omphalocele. Here’s the plan:

Once this precious girl is born, she will NOT have immediate surgery as we’d been told before!  It’s too risky, he informed us, unless the O ruptures and we have no choice.  The new plan is to wrap the O until she is stabilized, and then cover it in a cream that will encourage the skin to grow up the sides and over it.  It’s called “Paint & Wait”, because that’s exactly what we’ll do.   Her surgeon wants to achieve full skin coverage before she can be discharged from the NICU, which can take anywhere from 2-6 months, barring other complications.  This means that the O will still be there, visibly protruding, but that it will be protected by skin just like the rest of her body, and she’ll be able to commence normal baby activities!  She will eventually wear a compression wrap to encourage her abdomen to grow big enough to accommodate the organs that are outside.  Once her abdomen is big enough, “closure” surgery will be done to enclose everything into a normal-looking belly.   He predicts that the closure surgery will not happen until she’s at least 3 years old, which came as a big surprise to us!  We never imagined she’d have the O for so long.  But it’s the safest way to treat giant O’s, and gives her the best chances, so we’ll take it.  We’re so thankful that the Lord has given us a doctor who will do what he can and let God do the rest.   We know only He can make her complete.