10.17.17 Spine Surgery 3

We just met with Aimee's surgeon. Aimee has not yet been extubated, but she is stable and will be tranfered to ICU over the next few hours. Once she is settled in the ICU, we will be able to be with her again. 

The surgery didn't go as smoothly as hoped and Aimee had to be kept under for a couple extra hours longer than anticipated. Her curve was really stiff, bones were too soft, and her pelvis was very tilted. Basically, when the tension from the stiff curve was put on the upper screws into her neck, the screws came out. Also, it was very difficult to get the lower portion of the rods into the base, because of the pelvic tilt. The surgeon ended up doing a workaround of putting a band around the back side of the upper spine to hold the screws. He was actually pretty excited about it and plans to always do that for his future cases. 

Another challenge is that the neuromontitoring was not successful with Aimee. Her nervous system wasn't communicating in a monitorable way. Although there is no reason at this point to expect nerve damage, they were not able to be certain. We know that Aimee's nerves don't communicate well, but this was disappointing and saddening to hear. 

The hope is that these rods will last for 4 cm of spine growth, which should be about 2.5 years. He hopes that the next 2 adjustments will only be done on the left side to attempt to straighten out the curve. They will be adjusted by ultrasound and magnets every 4 months if the curve is flexible enough that he can drive the left side straighter. If it is not, he will just adjust for growth every 6 months or so. Once it is time to replace these rods, it should be a slightly simpler procedure as he placed a fixed extension at the base of the spine to make it easier to place new rods.