The Good, The Bad, and The Unknown

Okay, maybe I should say the great...Ethan is out of hospital again.  YEAH!!  He came out on Monday, one day shy of 3 weeks!  He is currently in therapy and not happy to have us only pop in for a visit yesterday.  :(  We have to do a new therapy with him called breath stacking.  They are not trained there yet, so we have been doing it once a day.

Breath stacking equipment at the hospital. (Yes, that is a resuscitation bag - modified for our use.)

The Bad - Ethan was not able to get his MRI, they were too worried about sedating him with a current respiratory issue.  They would like him to be well for 2-3 weeks...which if you've been following this blog, then you likely know that could be a difficult feat to reach.  Anesthesia also isn't keen on the idea of sedation for casting...but I was able to discuss this with our surgeon and he would like to recast in a couple weeks.  :)

The Unknown - Potentially a bit of bad as well...IF the surgeon is not able to see more than a 5 degree improvement with the next cast then he wants to revisit the surgery discussion.  When he laid this option out to me our conversation went like this:

Me: The youngest you've done surgery on is 4, right?
Him: Yes.
Me: Ethan isn't 4!  He only just turned 3.
Him: Yes, but he's a pretty big boy.
Me: Okay, so what is the youngest you can fuse (the spine)?
Him: The youngest I like to do is 10 years old.
Me: So, that's 14 surgeries.
Him: Ah, about that yes.  But the extension surgeries are only 1-1.5 hours long.
Me: Yes, but that is 14 risks of infection and we know that he is prone to infection.
Him: Ethan has proven to be a challenge in the past.

To cut the surgeon some slack, I did acknowledge that we know he will likely have to have fusion surgery to correct his scoliosis...we would just like to put it off for as long as possible.  He also said that there has been success with casting on older children.  The only limiting factor is that Ethan's scoliosis may be a bit more rigid.  Please send some good thoughts for the next casting.