Surgery is complete

Cheri is the blogger in the family but her and Jackson are resting in bed so I'm going to try my hand at it. Surgery got started late and took about 3 hrs. The Neurosurgeon said everything went well and as expected. We are back in the same room in the pediatric ICU. The first 24hrs will be the most painful, but he is on a heavy dose of morphine every 2 hrs so he is in and out. Even though his eyes are closed he must still be listening because he knows when Tom and Jerry goes off so we have to restart the DVD over and over again. I'll try to explain what they did and why. Most of you already know the story but I'll start from the beginning.

Because Jackson was born 11 weeks early he had a hemorrhage in his brain. (the brain is not ready to go thru the trauma of birth this early and is too weak) The blood clot developed in a pathway where spinal fluid is drained from the middle of your brain (ventricles) thru your spinal cord. This is called hydrocephalus or water on the brain. This is not uncommon in premature births as early as Jackson and older adults can develop it after strokes or severe head trauma from accidents. So Jackson had to have a shunt inserted into the ventricles (middle of the brain) to drain the fluid. The shunt consists of a catheter inserted into the brain and comes out behind his right ear where it is hooked up to a valve just underneath the scalp. Then there is tubing hooked up from the valve and runs down the inside of his right side into his abdominal area where the fluid is absorbed. (Am I boring anyone yet)

Now, since the valves drain at a steady rate there is no pressure on the brain to grow outward so there is no pressure on his skull to expand which caused it to fuse early in several areas. In normal people, the fluid in your brain is regulated naturally thru your body. As you get older the ventricles get bigger which causes your brain to expand which causes your head to grow. The brain and head in people continue to grow until they are about 18 years old.

Because Jackson's is fused, his brain is basically trying to grow but has nowhere to go. The Dr. said he could tell by the scans that there is areas on the inside of his skull that are indented from his brain growing into it. All this causes major pressure in the head which causes Jackson to get very, very sick. We've been dealing with this issue since last August.

So what he did today was make an incision from ear to ear over the top of the head and peel back the scalp so he could see the skull. He cut out the top half of the skull which was fused and broke it into several pcs so that the brain and skull could continue to grow. (I hope I'm not grossing anyone out) He put the pcs back leaving 1/4 to 1 inch gaps so that things can expand without the pressure, like normal people.

Hopefully this fixes the problem, I guess only time will tell. There is no doubt Jackson will need more surgeries down the road, but right now we could use going years without one. He's not even three yet and has had at least 10 surgeries. He's a tough kid.