Korbins Surgery

Well most of you know that my littlest boy, 4 year old Korbin just had kidney surgery. It went really well. They didn't know before the surgery just what they were gonna be doing and couldn't really give us a time frame for how long surgery would take or how long recovery would be either.

We had to go up to Columbia Missouri for the surgery at the University of Missouri children's hospital. They started surgery at 7am and finally came to get us at 10am to tell us they had finished. The doctor told us it took longer than he hoped because the xrays kept coming out "weird". The problem was that he had a birth defect of his left kidney and ureter. It had two ureters and the one at the bottom of his kidney was blocked. They weren't sure why it was blocked but that kidney was enlarged because of the blockage.

Anyhow, they found that the blockage was due to a segment of that ureter being underdeveloped and closed off. They removed that segment. The doctor said he didn't want to have to remove so much but it was the onlychoice. I thought they were removing the whole thing but I guess because it was the one at the bottom they needed to save it. They put in a plastic stent to hold the ureter together. He also said he had to make a bigger incision they had planned too but it's not any bigger than I had expected.

Korbin is trooper! He had a lot of pain on Thursday (day of surgery) through until Friday night. They finally took out the epidural and started giving him morphine, tylenol with codeine and motrin on a rotating schedule. Also ditropan for the bladder spasms. Around 9pm friday night Korbin decided he felt great! He wanted to get up and walk and play and be himself. Unfortunately everything in the childrens area of the hospital is closed by that time even the playrooms. They kept his meds going for the night and by Saturday morning he was ready to go home! Since he's been home he hasn't napped at all and has been trying really hard to be his old self. He wants to play and be wild but he knows when he's pushed too hard. We can tell when he's hurting by how he moves.

The crazy doctor said he can go back to school today........not happening. It needs to at least be a week after his surgery in my opinion so he's gonna go visit his teacher tomorrow but is not going to stay at school.

Check out the pictures on my myspace www.myspace.com/kmtkbest

I'm so glad this is over. now one more surgery to remove the stent (on valentines day, Kirke will be in California so I get to do this one alone) and hopefully this is over for us. We will probably still have to go for renal scans to make sure it's all working right once or twice though. No biggie, we're tough.

UPDATE:

Korbin had the stent removed on Valentines day. He came through the surgery fine, woke up kind of difficult but once he did he was good to go! In fact we did go........to Kentucky about an hour after he woke up we got released and headed to Wendy's house for the weekend. It was like he never even had surgery.

Funny conversation:

me: were you awake when the dr did your surgery?

Korbin: nope he put me to sleep and snuck right in and cut me open, played with my guts and then fixed my kidney and he glued me and taped me shut!

He is sooooo funny! It's so cute to hear him say "the dr played with my guts"!
We're all doing good and he goes back on the 7th of April for the next scan of his Kidney but doesn't have to be put to sleep....thank god!!