Surgery is scheduled

I think I have spread the word about this to most people already, but in the interest of keeping up with my record keeping, here is the latest:

One week ago, John and I picked the kids up at school a touch early and we headed to Children's Hospital for Cortlan's follow-up appointment/surgical consult. We had never been there before (fortunately, we have had no need before now), but we had heard that it was pretty fantastic.  The rumors were, for the most part, true.  The check in process was very efficient.  They gave us a buzzer (like you sometimes get at restaurants) so that they could easily notify us when it was our turn to head back to see the doctor.  This was necessary because the waiting room was huge.  There were aquariums, televisions, different stations set up with electronic games and coloring, and there was even a section of docked and secure ipads with apps for the kids to play.  All of this was great - because as we were the last appointment of the day, we ended up waiting for quite a while.

Once were finally called back to see the doctor, we had even more wait time.  Fortunately, my kids like to draw and color, and I had paper and crayons with me.  They drew pictures, we sang songs, and we all started to go a little stir-crazy.  A physicians assistant came in for a check, and then finally we saw the doctor.

The doctor explained to us that Cortlan's sleep study was abnormal.  Specifically, he had an average of 2.7 "episodes" of sleep apnea per hour, which, as far as I can tell, means that his breathing stopped or drastically reduced for some amount of time each episode.  At times, his blood oxygen levels decreased to 86%, when it should be 97-98% for a child his age, as explained to us.  Despite the fact that it initially seems a little scary to think that he is essentially stopping breathing nearly three times per hour, this all puts him in the category of "mild" sleep apnea.  When compared to having episodes every couple of minutes, as some people do, 2.7 per hour does seem mild.  Still, it is more than enough to be considered a problem that needs to be taken care of.

Cortlan will be having surgery on April 23rd.  At that time, he will have both his tonsils and adenoids removed, as well as several other procedures, including a "soft" scope through his nose, a "hard" scope through his mouth that goes deeper and is more investigative than the ones he had in December, and a biopsy.  These things will be done to farther examine the causes of the apnea as well as the narrowing of his trachea that was discovered in December.  He will have the surgery done at Children's Hospital (as opposed to the surgery center) and will stay overnight for observation due to the slightly higher risk of his case.

I know that some of this sounds disconcerting at first, but we are very hopeful and optimistic about the outcome.  We aren't blowing this off, but we also are not making a big deal of it, either.  In fact, one of Cortlan's friends from school is having nearly the same procedure done one week after him - he had the same sleep study done with 2.9 episodes per hour.  The most frustrating part of it all has been the timeline and that we aren't done with this all yet.  But, two months will go quickly, and we are looking forward to having it behind us and for Cortlan to get some much needed relief.