Whew, what a day. By 7:00 this morning, the big girls were ready for school and dropped off at their grandparents (tears and all) and Harper and I were on the interstate, booking it to her appointment with Duke Otolaryngology. For those of you who do not know, this was quite a feat as I am quite possibly the worst morning person on the planet!

The trip to and from was eventful in and of itself, between dealing with traffic delays that made us late to the appointment and a flat tire on the way back (not to mention the battles over riding in a car seat and the intermittent screaming spells 😳). BUT, we made it all in one piece!

So here’s the lowdown on the appointment… first, this was the same ENT we saw back in October who was adamant that Harper did not need to have her tonsils removed. She felt strongly that the surgery was not worth the risk, so I was apprehensive about today’s appointment. We were walking in with a recommendation for surgery from another specialist and I wasn’t sure how she would react to that.

To my surprise, everyone was on the same page. She read through the notes, looked at the sleep study results from December, inspected Harper’s tonsils, and said that it’s time. However, she then went back to Harper’s records, medical history, and brain scans, and said that her team cannot do it. There is a heightened risk for seizure patients with anesthesia, so even a common tonsillectomy can be a major ordeal. So she is referring us to another ENT at Duke, but is going to personally contact him and debrief him on Harper’s case in hopes that he will agree to schedule the surgery and not require us to make yet another trip up there for another consult first. We are praying this is the case so that we can move on forward with this and not have to make a separate trek up that way just to meet someone.

They are thinking this will be an in-patient surgery given our situation, but we will see what the final verdict is on that. The goal is that this will help some of Harper’s sleep issues- it seems that these breathing issues at night may be preventing her from getting into good sleep patterns, so she isn’t getting much REM sleep. This can cause issues for her during the day as she’s more tired than she should be, but can also lower her threshold for seizures. And it’s also a concern to have these kinds of sleep disturbances in combination with seizure activity at night.

So that’s where we are on that right now. We’ll be waiting to hear back from them about which doctor will take her on and go from there. And now this worn out mama is going to try to get a few hours of sleep in before our Little Love starts her middle-of-the-night wakings!