Glass Ceilings

The surgery waiting room at Cook Children's Hospital is nice - the ceiling is glass, letting the sun shine through onto those waiting below. The glass ceiling design, I assume, is to help keep people from feeling depressed and gloomy while doctors on the other side of the walls cut on their kids. I suppose it helps. Glass ceilings are great, but as long as you know they're there, you know there's something looming over you.

Doctors Honeycutt and Donahue both operated - one on each of the boys - so that the surgeries could begin and end at close to the same time. They finished around 2pm (if I remember correctly) and said the surgeries went very well.

We saw the boys afterward. All things considered, they looked well. As well as you can look when you're two weeks old and have newly sewn-up incisions in your head and abdomen, a hunk of plastic in your head, and tubing running from your brain to your abdomen. It's not easy seeing the bulges from the shunts and the raised-skin path of tubing running down their little bodies, but we're focusing on how this helps the boys in the long run. John-Raven especially had become noticeably more lethargic over the last few days - a sign that the pressure from the hydrocephalus was finally becoming too much for him.

We'll have to monitor the shunts and the hydrocephalus for the rest of the boys' lives to make sure the shunts work properly and don't get infected. Shunts are notorious about needing revision, but we're hoping that we won't have too many problems so that we can spend more time examining the effects of the holoprosencephaly - the other condition that may impact the boys' development. The HPE could manifest in any number of ways and in different degrees, and although we don't want to set limits where there may be none, we wonder where the next challenges will be. I have to admit, as I looked up a the glass ceiling while waiting for the surgery to be over, I found myself worrying about the boys' own glass ceilings. Will there be physical challenges? Mental challenges? A combination? How will they react to the obstacles they're faced with? How will we react as parents? At this point, there's no telling, but we've seen good signs from the boys so far. And there's one thing I keep reminding myself about glass ceilings. Glass breaks.