Dr Raskin just came back to say that surgery is all done and went exactly as he had hoped. In operation, they were able to test which individual nerves were sending good and bad signals, and he said those tests all made sense with her history and observations of her gait. For example, the nerves that send messages to upper legs were only about 20% corrupted, so he and Dr Rojas were able to be very conservative with those. She has most of her extra tone in her ankles, especially her right side, so those bad messages were the ones he was able to disrupt. They are very specialized and don’t cut all the way through the nerves.
As far as the spinal cord, he has no concerns about spinal fluid leaking. He said he sewed everything up nice and tight. Someone told us she would have to stay flat for three days, but he and his team have determined that a day of staying flat is sufficient for healing and have exactly the same outcomes as more cautious peers at other hospitals (which is probably where we heard about the three day restriction). So she is only going to have to stay flat through noon tomorrow, and she can be on her back or her tummy. This will be much easier for me than I had expected!! She has a catheter and two IVs still, and the pain team will monitor her pain meds, but he says there is very little pain associated with recovery.
We will definitely be staying here at Lurie through the weekend as they monitor her healing, then we’ll stay here until they get our insurance to approve the transfer down the street to Shirley Ryan. He will continue to check on her while she is here and then will come over there for her post op visits once we’re settled there.
For recovery, he says she will likely need at least the six weeks of intensive rehab and not to expect her to roll out of bed and move normally until they retrain her on how to move her body without the confusing feedback she was getting. This is what we expected, so no worries there!
Praise God for how well everything went! We are now just waiting for them to start bringing her out of anesthesia, and we’re hoping to be able to go back and see her within an hour.