Update on Nathan's Surgery

Here's Nathan on the Tuesday after his Friday surgery.  This was at our office.  Nathan and I went in to recognize one of my marketing co-workers who received a promotion.

You can see the steri strips on his incision.  It's a good thing someone snapped this picture with my camera because on the way home, he took them off!  We had been trying to not give them any attention so he wouldn't realize they were there but he discovered them on Monday night.  The fact that they made it through that many days was great!

And here he is this past Wednesday...almost 2 weeks after surgery.  You can see the incision in this picture.  The stitches were internal and they told us they would just dissolve on their own.


I zoomed in A LOT on this picture so it's not the best quality or the easiest to see.  I probably should take a better one.  You'll see the full picture later :)  But the point is, the incision looks great!  Dr. Cox did the incisions on a crease in his neck so it is less noticeable.

So yesterday morning, Thursday, we went in for our 2 week follow-up.  Dr. Cox thought it looked great and she let me know how to care for it from here on out.  I need to rub my finger over it once a day to break up the raised part and promote healing.  She said that I could buy a tube of Mederma for the scar using that would also help me remember to rub it every day!  Because of his age and the size of the incision it is unlikely that you will be able to see the scar very well as time goes on.   I do need to keep it out of the sun (use SPF on that area) for 6 months as well.

She also shared the pathology report with me.  The mass she removed was simply eptopic cartilage.  Eptopic basically means that something forms where it is not supposed to form.  From how I understood it (I wish Matt would have been there for this part...he's so much better at this stuff than me!) the trachea formed and somehow some additional cartilage probably just formed there on his neck.  She said it could have become a branchial cleft cyst if it had formed further, but it just never did.  No tract ever formed.  The branchial cleft cyst is what our pediatrician thought it probably was.

So the good news is, it wasn't anything serious at all.  I asked her if we had left it alone if there was risk of infection.  She said no, but of course you would still be able to see it.  So basically, we could have left it there without complications but we couldn't know that without removing it.  We feel good about going ahead and doing it since there was the risk of him having to deal with it as an adult, with further complications.  They had told us that if it was a cyst it had the possibility of becoming cancerous when he was older.  So we had to go with the information we had and that wasn't a risk we were willing to take. 

Of course, the bills have not rolled in yet and that two thousand dollar deductible for him is going to hurt!  But we were grateful to be able to make the decision to go ahead and do it...and glad we could do it the same year as the birth of our next boy!  Who ever said having kids was inexpensive?