Surgery Coming Part 2: Little A Grows

So Little A was born. She was given a G-tube to eat with, a tube was shoved down her nose and out the hole in her neck they created so she did not choke on her own spit. It was called (I think) a cervical esophagostomy, but short term is Spit Fistula. It was a messy sucker, too. It was right at the base of her neck around her collar bone area on her left side. Because it was messy we were taught how to use pediatric colostomy bags from a company named Hollister to cover them. Here is a picture of one of the bags and it's adhesive pad: bag of hell.


To put the bag on her, we had to hold her still, (Yeah, try that with a wiggling infant!) her neck had to be at a certain angle, it had to be clean of spit and or other liquids, it had to be smoothed out for the adhesive strip to fit properly. When we finally did get it on her (properly..) we had to watch it so it would not fill up with air and pop! There is a cork like tip on it that can drain the liquid (spit) and air if done properly. Sometimes we had good days. Sometimes we had terrible one's. But we made sure she kept that tube up her poor little nose. (Yes, sometimes she took it out. I put it right back in. The things we learn for our children.) We made sure she had love and comfort. Her G-Tube was cared for...even when it came out!!! Gosh, what a time all that was!


They finally did the main surgery on her once she became older and gained more weight. They did a colon interposition for the esophagus. I remember Dr. Bass drawing a picture for E when she spoke about it. She did a diagram on the paper they use to cover the examination tables to show him how they would take a piece of her colon and form it into her esophagus. I was amazed by the process. There were many opportunities to correct the esophageal atresia, but this method seemed wise for our daughter because of how big the gap was from her stomach to her mouth.

She no longer had the spit fistula. She eventually crawled and knocked out the damn G-tube. I never put it back in. I just picked it up off the rug, glared at it, covered her tummy with gauze and tape while I called the Nurse, told her what happened, and that was that. No more G-tube. We tell Little A she's so special she has two belly buttons!