Another surgery for Aiden

It's been almost 3 months since Aiden's last surgery and while his finger healed perfectly, his toe is a different story. Every day (sometimes two or three times/day), we have to "change his wraps" which consists of rolling a piece of saline soaked gauze, placing it deep inside the space between his big toe and wrapping it up with self-stick bandage. This is a process we are not unfamiliar with - we thought it would be a piece of cake compared to having to do it between each and every toe space when he had his initial separations - but we have now been doing these dressing changes for entirely too long. His toe should be healed. And according to Dr. Fearon, it should have been healed several weeks ago.

Unfortunately, it looks like we will be heading back to Dallas this week to address the issue. Dr. Fearon wants to place a new skin graft on the wound to speed the healing process. It's disappointing to have to put Aiden under again. We know this is the best thing for him in order to finally get this taken care of - but after trying to calm him during the many dressing changes by telling him we need to do it so that his toe heals and he  won't have to have surgery for a long time - it just breaks my heart to have to do just that. We've slowly been talking about it with him. He seems to understand that in order to quit doing the wraps, Dr. Fearon needs to fix it again. I'm sure we will meet more resistance when we are actually back at the hospital and he realizes what is going on.

On a different note, we were once again reminded why we love Dr. F so much. He spent 25 minutes on the phone with us discussing Aiden's foot and answering our questions. He told us he felt for us having to do these wraps every day for 3 months and for Aiden having to endure it. He informed us that he wanted to get Aiden's surgery on the schedule soon, and that he would be out of the country for 10 days at the beginning of September, so either August 26th or September 8th would be best. I told him I'd prefer the 26th, not only to get it over with, but also because we had signed Aiden up for soccer for the first time and he couldn't wait to start. We worried his foot wasn't going to be healed in time and hated to think of having to disappoint him yet again by telling him he couldn't play. Dr. Fearon said he would clear his schedule for Friday the 26th saying, "We want it healed and we want Aiden to play soccer."

It is so nice to have a doctor who expresses concern for the way we feel. Someone who acknowledges the pain our child is in and who makes it his priority to do something about it. You see, with doctors you sometimes run the risk of having to choose between the one who has the most experience in the field or the one that has the best bed-side manner and ability to relate to patients /families. It is not often you get the best of both worlds. We feel very blessed to have found that in Dr. Fearon.

Surgery should be scheduled for Friday. We will know more details tomorrow. I'll update soon!