Lady Emma Goes To Surgery

Lady Emma Cuddlestone-Smythe on a better day, defeating her Daddy in a wargame recently.

Today we are at Childrens' Memorial Hospital waiting for our daughter, "Lady Emma", to undergo surgery on her back to correct a condition that she has. This is a sort of "twofer" operation as we are also having a cyste removed from her finger. The hand surgeon will do the cyste removal first and then when he is finished, the neurosurgeon will do the work on her back, near the base of the spine.

Lady Emma was quite the brave soldier this morning and didn't express anything but the mildest of concern about the pending operation. We have been faced with this for nearly two years, so I think that she has had sufficient time to grow accustomed to the idea of the surgery. So she seems to be taking it much better than her Mother and Dad.

We should be finished with both operations around 4PM this afternoon and then we will get to see her in the recovery room. We plan to spend the night in her room tonight and then spend the next three or four days through Sunday with her. Mom and Dad will trade off spending nights at the hospital after the first night. Once Lady Emma comes home, she will have one to two weeks on her back waiting for the incision to heal.

I will post updates as we get some progress reports. I am rather surprised that I was able to figure out how to blog on the laptop, so I guess that you really can teach an old dog some new tricks.

As of 2:45pm the finger surgery was successful and they were getting Lady Emma ready for the back surgery.

Update at 4pm C.S.T - Chicago
They are closing Lady Emma up right now so things seem to be moving along nicely and faster than I had expected. The finger surgeon also reported that the cyst appeared to be benign, but they are sending it to the lab to be sure. I would expect that we shall be seeing Lady Emma in recovery within the hour.

Update at 4:40pm CST - Chicago
We just met with the surgeon and she told us that everything went exactly as she expected it to be, based on her prior view of the MRI pictures. She gave us a good run down on what to expect during the next several days and throughout the recovery period. We are very pleased to have all of this over with. It went so fast. Now for the long recovery period.