Surgery

Sam is going into surgery tomorrow, sometime between noon and 2pm. It’s going to be exploratory bowel surgery. The surgeon is going to look at every inch of his bowels, find the obstruction and fix it. She’ll also take a look at his liver, spleen, everything else. With the obstruction, depending on size, health, etc, she’ll cut it out, create two stomas, where they’ll pull the two ends of his intestines out and attach two ostomy bags. Of course, there’s a chance they won’t need to do that and can just sew his intestines back together. If they do need to create the two ostomies, at some point they’ll go back and reconnect his intestines.

There’s a possibility the contrast fluid that’s still in his abdomen is gathered in his appendix. If so, they’ll remove it. It’s possible it’s the duplication cyst, we’ll see when they go in.

For anesthesiology, they’re going to use a pediatric cardiac anesthesiologist.

The surgeon said that from her point of view, the surgery itself isn’t risky. But for Sam, his heart is the greatest risk, very risky indeed. We’re nervous.