Courtney's Surgery

This spring I took Court to an ENT to get everything checked out. Suspicions were confirmed: deviated septum and chronic sinus problems. Here's a pic of her scan.

On the first pic...you see some black space on the left and right of her face. Those black areas are supposed to show up where air flows. There's supposed to be a lot more black area on this scan. Her sinuses are completely blocked.

Also you can see in the nose area...that is supposed to be a straight line. The bone is pushing her septum to the side completely. This is why she has never been able to breath through her nose well.

So surgery was scheduled. It went well. It was an out patient surgery. Here are some pics before and after.

Courtney in prep before surgery

Courtney after waking up.

She's a tiny bit out of it.

We had to change these pads for a little over a week.

Dr. Lee came to talk to us after her surgery. He said her case was a lot worse than he thought it was going to be. She had a tremendous amount of polyps. He removed them and had to shave some bone down. Her sinuses were completely blocked and he had to punch through areas to make windows. He removed quite a bit of built up infection. He gave us several pages of pictures showing what it looked like before and what he did to open things up.

Courtney had 4 strings attached to the upper and lower packing in her nose. There were two strings taped to each side of her face. In the middle of the night, she pulled them out in her sleep. I got up to change her gauze. Went to through the old one away and walked in to her nose bleeding through the fresh gauze I had just put on. It was a scary site. I saw the packing laying on her chest...so knew she had pulled it out. She started freaking out and crying. I had to get her calmed down and eventually the bleeding slowed down. It was an exciting night to say the least.

The week after the surgery went well. She pretty much laid around and watched TV. We had to rinse out her nose several times a day and change the drainage gauze. She was a trooper and didn't whine much at all.

Day before we get the last of the packing taken out.