Surgery For Raegan

Raegan was born with a clogged tear duct that would not go away. She had been on so many antibiotics and eye drops and she had her tear duct probed with a wire 3 times and it failed every time. Her right eye unclogged after the first probing but not the left one. She was always getting infections and it was just miserable for her. The Doctor sent us to a special eye Doctor in Utah at the University and she had suggested a surgery where they go through the eye and put in a stent that would keep the tear duct open but only 30% of these work or she said because Raegan’s is clearly very blocked off it could be the shape of the duct and that surgery wouldn’t work and they would have to do a more invasive surgery where they made a one inch incision on the side of her nose and go in and break the bridge of her nose and make a fake tear duct and re route it so she would never use the original tear duct again and that surgery was a 99% guarantee. This was a really hard decision for us to make so we left it up to the Doctor and told her that she can decide when she gets in there and sees her eye. She ended up needing the more invasive surgery with the incision :( So Raegan was scheduled for surgery first thing in the morning and because the hospital didn’t know we have a family history of malignant hyperthermia and it takes more time and different anesthesia equipment they said they needed to bump the surgery back till later and at Primary Children’s Hospital instead of the University. So Raegan fasted all night and only had one bottle of milk that morning and then fasted all day long and we had to keep her occupied all day at the hospital waiting for a time. This was exhausting and so sad to starve her all day, we felt horrible about it. It was later that evening by the time they got her in for surgery and she was one mad baby. I was so nervous and scared when they took her from me for surgery. We waited for what seemed like a really long time but was only a couple hours. This was very hard on Josh and I!! When she finally got out of surgery she was crying and so sad and she was in pain so they were trying to get her pain under control. She came out with an eye patch and had to wear this for weeks following. I had to take it off and clean her eye and the wound and then put it back on so she wouldn’t touch her eye or rub it. Many times she rubbed the patch off and rubbed her stitches, this was a nightmare. I started putting socks on her hands and sleeping with her in my arms so I could watch her. The first few weeks were the worst and after that it started to get better. Her eye was still infected and it watered all the time and we worried the surgery didn’t work the Doctor said as time goes on we will know if it worked and if it didn’t we would have to go in and have surgery on her sinuses so for now we are praying it worked. Here is our adventure from the morning of surgery to the days following.