Hannah's Smile

I really love this 6 year old, teeth-missing, fading scar, not quite symmetrical smile! But she may not be smiling quite so brightly for a few days. Hannah will be having her next cleft surgery on Wed (the 16th). This is her bone graft. The surgeon will be taking bone from her hip to place in the cleft of her gumline (which is the only part that still has a hole - the rest of her palate was repaired almost 4 years ago). This will provide bone for her permanent teeth to anchor to when they come in. It's important that this surgery be done *before* her permanent top teeth come in..and well, she's at the age that it's time to do it. (We probably could have waited several months, but being a teacher - I really wanted it done in the summer. Waiting until next summer would have been pushing it). While we're not strangers to surgeries around here, this will be a new experience for us in some ways. It is a different surgeon and a different hospital. Hannah's regular cleft surgeon Dr. Grant (who is wonderful!!) doesn't do this one particular surgery. We still see him yearly, but he refers this one out to an oral surgeon. The particular surgeon we are using (the one who does a lot of these surgeries) doesn't use Children's Hospital, where we've been before. So this will be our first experience at UAB. I was a little concerned that it might be a little less "child-friendly" than Children's and it is definately less familiar to Hannah. But, I have some friends whose children have had experiences at UAB and they said they were very well taken care of and have had very good experiences there.

So, Tuesday we go for our pre-op with the surgeon and to meet the anesthesiologist. Then Wed. is our surgery. I have no idea yet what time. We'll get all our questions answered Tuesday I guess. What I do know is that we will spend 1 night in the hospital. The mouth part of the surgery is really not supposed to be that bad. She'll be swollen and bruised, but it's not supposed to be all that painful. Less than her original palate surgery I've been told, but I don't really know. She will be on a soft diet for a while, but I don't know the specifics of that (how long, how soft, etc.). I do know that her hip will be the more painful site, at least at first. She'll have a pain pump to give med. directly to the site on her hip while we're in the hospital. I expect her to be sore for a while afterwards and activity will be limited for a while, maybe a couple weeks.

So, say a prayer for my sweet Hannah this week. She's handling the anticipation remarkably well. She admits to being a little scared, but overall I think she's doing well. She did ask me in the car this morning if we could "send out invitations" for people to pray for her! love it! Consider this your invitation. :-) I also wrote out a prayer request at church and I was going to put it in the offering basket (which is one way at our church to make prayer requests known - then they e-mail them to people later). But Hannah would have none of that. She wanted to carry the prayer request slip directly to our pastor. Which she did after church. And then she told our pastor she wanted to send "invitations" to everybody so they would pray for her. Our pastor told her if she'd put that request in the basket, they'd e-mail it to the whole church and then it would be like the whole church got an invitation to pray. Hannah smiled really big and told her okay, and dropped it in the basket. I love that she's not shy about asking! Of course, neither of my girls are shy about very much. :-)

Meanwhile, Sadie is being so very sweet to Hannah about the whole thing..telling her not to be scared, she's going to pray for her, she's going to make Hannah a "beautiful card", etc. But, she's also let it be known that she's glad it's Hannah this time and not her! ha ha!! Sadie is really super excited to be spending the night at "nana and granddaddy's house!" rather than the hospital!