Ilieostomy Take Down

Many of you have asked about the reason for his surgery and I realized I never really explained what it was for.  So here goes…

When Marlin was a week old, he developed a perforation in his small intestine.  They operated that night and took out 4 cm of his small intestine.  This is when they created the stoma that he had for almost 5 months.  This allowed him to poop out his side.  His intestines were not connected.  When the hole occurred, the area around it started to die.  This is why they had to remove the 4 cm.  They did not sew it together then because they wanted to make sure they had all the bad parts.  Also, this is a pretty traumatic event for a little guy and sewing it backs together at that point could have been very bad.  The part after they cut it apart was still inside him but not being used.

They didn’t want to reconnect the intestines until he got stronger and bigger.  Ideally, he would have been about 10 pounds or bigger.  Our surgeon said he has done the reconnect on smaller babies, but found it was a lot more successful the larger the baby.  We felt comfortable taking care of his stoma, so we waited until he was 10 pounds.  Most folks have a bag to catch the poop in, but because he was so little, we just used gauze and an extra diaper and changed him often.  We also used some special ointment called Ilex that protected his skin from the acidic stool.

Basically, this surgery was to reconnect his intestines and make sure all the plumbing works.  Which it did and still does.  It took a few days before he could eat.  They wanted him to “poop” before he could eat.  I say, “poop” because it was really just dirty water in the beginning.   We expected to have weeks of diarrhea and terrible diaper rash, but we were very lucky.  We only had about a week of the loose stool and no diaper rash.  We were very proactive in that department and lathered his butt every chance we had.

He has made an amazing recovery.  The only little glitch is that his body didn’t like the internal “dissolvable” stitches and so it is trying to push them out of his incision.  The doctor has assured us that this is not out of the ordinary and that it will be fine.  The incision looks good even around those areas.  His little body is doing exactly what it is supposed to be doing (getting rid of foreign bodies).

He continues to grow and eat well.  He has maintained his weight, which is very good for this type of surgery (and not eating for two days).

He amazes us every day!  He is smiling and trying to laugh all the time.  Overall, he is a very good baby and we are blessed to have him here.  If you look at the odds for this type of surgery, they were not in his favor.  The stubbornness of the combination of Ferrara and Peterson really helped him in this case.

Thank you again for all the support and prayers.  We couldn’t have made it with out them.

I have included a few pictures.  Warning: they are graphic.  They are the before and after.