Heavy Heart

I wasn't gonna post this week since I'm spending awesome time with my parents. After Sunday I won't see them again for four months. Insert the tears. Anyway my oldest Brayden has always has ear issues. This started at age 15 months with tubes. He's had tubes 2-3 times along with adenoids being removed. I knew last year when he had a nasty ear infection (around August-End of September) that he had a nice size hole in his left eardrum and a smaller size in the right. We opted to watch it and test his hearing. Patching the left ear was pretty invasive and didn't want to take a chance of hurting his hearing more. Fast forward to two weeks ago. I took Brayd to his new peds office to get established and she said his left ear was a big hole, thinking yes I know nothing new. She kept on about it and insisted we go to the ENT just for a checkup. We hadn't been in a year so I thought fine it won't hurt. So today we go, thankfully my mom went with me. Indiana doctor never showed me what his ear looked like. Houston doctor got his tool and showed both of us. In your eardrum there is a bone in the center, my poor baby has his eardrum missing from that bone down on the left. The right there is a big hole (same as the left started).  I'm not putting the Indiana doctor down, I love him and trust him. He's actually known nationwide. My plan is to call him and try to speak to him personally about this. Like I said he's been with us for seven years and I've known the new doctor for a whole 30 minutes.

With finding this out it makes sense: 1. He talks so loud so we are always trying to sshhh him down a little. 2. He mumbles and is hard to understand at times. 3. He grabs our face and gets close to us...duh he's reading our lips. I feel like my child has been given a shit deck of cards! He has this ear thing, he has an lazy eye thing which will be for another  post, he has ADHD, oh let's also throw in a mild form of Autism. Now don't get me wrong I'm so thankful these issues are not life threatening. If you are wondering the cause it's a mixture between the tubes and his ear infections.

Now onto how they fix his ears. It will be two different operations both lasting 90 minutes each. The doctor will cut the skin behind his ear as a graf and go through kind of on the head close to the top of the ear to get to the eardrum. He will do his magic to make an eardrum. There is a 1 and 15% chance the graf won't take. His missing eardrum is a 1 and 100 thing too. He will miss three days of school, no physical activity for two weeks, and a bunch of packing in his ear. Sounds fun huh? The procedure is called a tympanoplasty. I'm not going to put images up just for the weak stomach. As you can tell it's the middle of the night I've yet to go to sleep all I keep thinking about is this.

So if you have a few minutes if you don't mind would you say a prayer for my big guy? Please pray that God leads us into making the correct choice and that Brayden will be able to hear like he should.