Round Two

Everything healed up extremely well from the first surgery. Aside from a scarline that seemed to hide itself, especially once Zeke's hair grew back out, you could hardly even tell he had the first surgery.

While we didn't notice Zeke being bothered by the nevus at all, we did start to notice one of the other characteristics of the tissue - it is very thin and rips easily. There were many times while Zeke was learning to walk (or just crawling around) that he would bump his head just like any toddler would do. But, if he hit it just right on the nevus, there would be a little rip in the skin followed by some blood. It always seemed to only last for a minute or two and wouldn't re-rip or anything like that. So while sometimes bothersome, again it did not impact the way Zeke behaved.

Everything else was pretty normal for Zeke. He did go through a several month stretch of not being able to shake a cold/pneumonia/cough thing. He was on antibiotics several times and also started taking albuterol treatments to help out. Things seemed to have cleared up this summer, so we think it was just some bug that wouldn't go away. I don't think any of our doctors have thought it has been related to his nevus in any way, so that has been good to know.

4/6/2013

On 4/24/2013, we met with our plastic surgeon again to review Zeke's progress and talk about next steps. She was very happy with how everything had healed and felt it was time to move to the next stage. While she felt that she would be able to get some more tissue with another excision, she thought that now would be a good time to try a tissue expansion. She didn't feel that she would be able to get as much skin as she'd like through an excision and it would be better to try an expansion earlier than later. This made us a little nervous because of all the risks that come along with the procedure. However, after talking to the doctor a little more extensively about the procedure, we were reassured that the risks are actually quite low and that if anything did ever start to go wrong, we would be able to stop the process, remove the expanders, and regroup.

So, we decided to go forward with the expansion. She would attempt to insert two, one larger one on the top of his head and a smaller one behind his ear towards the back of his head. We scheduled the surgery for 6/18/2013. Before having the surgery, we also met with his dermatologist just to make sure nothing seemed to be changing with the tissue. Again, everything seemed to be looking fine.

Pictures from 6/17/2013:

This time around, surgery was going to be outpatient and also at the Children's Hospital in Minnetonka. Elisha was enrolled in a summer day camp at the YMCA so he went there for the day while Isabella went to daycare like normal. We did drop them off a little early to make sure we checked in at time, but expected to easily be home by normal pickup times.

Again, surgery went just as well, if not better than planned. Not only was our surgeon able to get both expanders placed just how she had hoped, but she was also able to do a little bit of excision off the front part of the nevus during the surgery. She was able to get a strip about 1x4 inches (this is a bit of a guess, we can't quite remember, but somewhere in that range!). We were able to hold Zeke while he woke up this time which was helpful because he was very upset as he woke up. This was likely due to being hungry, pain, and just not quite understanding what was going on. We were able to give him some painkillers, so that helped quite a bit. When he woke up later in the afternoon, he already seemed pretty much back to his normal self.

Pictures from 6/21/2013, you can see the slightly inflated balloons:

Then on 6/24/2013, we had a one week followup to make sure everything was looking okay.  As has become pretty normal with all of this, everything was looking great.  We scheduled our next followup for 7/3/2013 to remove the stitches and fill the bags for the first time.