The good news: Karsie is now big enough to accept the tissue expanders, and unless something happens to the surgeon, she will have her surgery in June.
The interesting news: Something happened to the surgeon. She is pregnant! And she's due in July, which puts a wrench in pretty much all our plans. How dare she!
So, the plan is that she will have her surgery in October. The bad news with that is that it's almost four months longer to wait than our original plan. However, the good news with that is that she has four months to grow, and the surgeon still thinks Karsie will be ready for closure surgery around Christmas time or a little after. Plus, Dr. Gosman endorses compression wrapping. So, we're trying that again...for the third time. So far so good. The hope is that the wrapping will make the tissue expansion easier or (best case scenerio) not necessary.
So, here's our plan: October 6th we will be going in for a pre-op. Then, on the 13th we will go in for surgery to put in the expanders. Then, for one month, nothing will happen as Karsie recovers from surgery. Next, for about 6 weeks we will be expanding her tissue. Finally, she will have a few weeks of resting while the expanders are staying the same size, and then she will have a closure surgery. Depending on how everything is, she will either have it completely closed, which would be great, but probably unlikely. If they can't get all the muscle over and closed, she will have a patch put over to connect the two sides and later she will have another surgery to repair that, which will be just like a normal hernia surgery. Either way, we should be mostly done with all of this this time next year. The hernia surgery would probably be a couple years after the closure surgery.
So, here's to a clear summer for us. Congratulations Dr. Gosman!
