Pre-Op-A-Lula

 We made it safe and sound to Dallas.  Drove from ATL to Monroe, LA on Sunday and Monroe to Dallas on Monday.  Pretty much the whole trip on Monday was in torrential rain and we saw a number of cars skidded off the road and in the ditch, but we made it through it all.  We've settled into our home away from home at the Residence Inn near Medical city where we always stay and today was Pre-Op appointment day.  We had a string of appointments from 10:30-3 pm and Isaiah was a trooper

  We started out with pre-registration so we don't have to deal with it at 6:30 tomorrow morning, then had pictures, and saw the anthropologist, Dr Chan, to register all his current measurements.  She was happy with his growth and said we're pretty lucky he's within 2-3mm of being symmetrical across his face which isn't always the case with how much revision Apert kiddos have to their faces.  We then saw the intake nurses, child life, and got some labs done.  We grabbed a quick pretzel in the atrium for lunch and kept powering through the day.

  Next was Dr Sacco his Nuerosurgeon who showed us the scans of Isaiah's head.  Still always crazy to see all the 'slices' of his brain, but basically we got to see where the bone was missing near where the right side of the his brain meets the corpus callosum.  You could see bone on the left , but nothing on the right where the dura is poking through and the sac of spinal fluid that's sitting right atop his sinuses.  From looking at the scans it was bigger than I was thinking.  Bigger than his eyeball, almost the size of an egg or small clementine orange.  Dr Sacco thinks that most of his drainage out of his nose for the last year plus has been spinal fluid.  They'll be able to confirm it tomorrow during the surgery.

  Last, but not least, was our visit with Dr. Fearon.  Always such a calming presence trying to allay our fears since this is not a 'normal' surgery on the Apert care plan.  He walked us through what they're going to do and I'll spare the gory details for now.  We talked about timing of future cranio vaults (1-2 years down the road) and got our annual picture.

  We just had our normal 'last meal' of In N Out since Isaiah's cutoff at Midnight for solids.  We can tell Isaiah's much more nervous this go around.  The autism is making it a bit tricky to read.  He's projecting it all sort of 3rd person like but talking about Rachel's parent's cat Freya.  He gets weepy and starts saying things like 'what if Freya doesn't wake up?' 'I don't want Freya to get hurt and die.' when we all know he's talking about himself and then he sees Mr. Deeds throw a cat out the window of a building on fire (movie on tv) and istantly switches it off and starts laughing.  I'll never get used to that emotion swing and you sometimes never know what will work and what won't.

  Anyways, continued thoughts and prayers are appreciated.  More updates to follow