A Fresh Update

Hi Everyone. I know we do not have many followers on this blog but I am hoping to change that soon. Aleah is doing well. She has had her normal run ins with being sick this winter and spring as she does every winter, spring and fall. She is doing well and therapy and continues to impress them each week with her strength. She is currently attending speech, ot and pt once every week, and we are going to start aquatic therapy with her sometime this summer. We have had a lot of appointments recently because we are transferring most of her care to doctors at Cincinnati Children's Hospital. We hear nothing but great things about the doctors in all areas there and we are getting most of her specialists switched there with the exception of cardiology and neurosurgery. Neurosurgery will most likely be switched as well to Cincy but we will keep cardiology in at Dayton Children's because we love and trust her cardiologist. This could be a very long update but to keep it short and sweet I will give the condensed version of the last few months. Aleah has been followed by an orthopedic specialist since birth. When she was three she was diagnosed with Scoliosis and we were told they would want to eventually do surgery. Last year they wanted to do surgery on her back for her scoliosis and I felt like we should give it more time. So we decided to go see an Ortho doctor at Cincy Children's and he recommended it was time to go ahead to fix her back. She is at about an 80% curvature which at this time is fully correctable. If we continue to wait it will not be fully correctable and will start to affect her lung and heart function. This is not something we want to do give the fact that she already has heart issues. We went to see her cardiologist at the beginning of May to check her heart out and get ok from him for surgery. He said her heart looked stable at this time and he felt her heart is strong enough to proceed with surgery on her back. This is the first of many pre op doctor's appointments and testing that we will have to have before she has her surgery. Her surgery will be placing the growing rods in her back along each side of her spine to help to correct the curvature. Every six months or so they will go in and place a magnet against the to grow the rods as she grows. The surgery will be a very painful and it will be a long recovery for our girl. We are trying to see the bright side of things and know that this will help her sit up and keep her from the danger of the curvature affecting her heart and lung function. Her Surgery is scheduled for August 21st so please start saying some prayers that all will go well for her. Until then we are going to go out and do as much fun stuff as we can with her this summer. We are taking a trip to the zoo next week and I will make sure to have a post all about it! Thank you in advance for all of the prayers and support for Aleah. Here are some pictures of our girl that have been taken in the last few months!