Today David will go to the hospital to do pre-surgery bloodwork and paperwork. I thought I would share some of the doctor's words explaining the surgery from a report he sent us.
"I have explained to David that I would recommend surgery to do a suboccipital craniectomy, a C1 laminectomy and a dural graft to see if we could get more room for the spinal cord to circulate at the cranial cervical junction, and thus reduce the likelihood of the syringomelia getting larger. It is not a 100% chance, but it gives him the best chance we have got, and this is what most doctors would recommend. Why? Because if the syrinx just continues to get bigger, it is going to cause numbness, disassociation of temperature and weakness, and ultimately paralysis. The goal is to try to divert some of that fluid around the spinal cord instead of through the spinal cord, and hopefully that dilation and fluid-filled space might collapse down, or at best, not get bigger. Sometimes they continue to get larger and you have to do a shunting procedure to try to reduce spinal fluid pressure."
What does that mean? They are going to make the opening at the base of the skull larger by 1 cm. They will also use some of the lining of David's skull to create a sling to support the cerebellum as well as to create a patch which will hopefully allow the cerebro spinal fluid (csf) to circulate normally.
We do not know what time surgery will be on Friday. The hospital will call us Thursday afternoon and let us know, so until then we wait.....
In the meantime, Minnie is home and resting. Her surgery went well and we hope she will soon be barking at the doorbell again.
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