Special Guest Dad Post: Don A. from Maryland (WARNING: graphic surgery photo)

Don A. from Maryland wrote to share some photos of his 3 year old daughter's procedure in May of 2018.  Fair warning, the first picture is from mid-surgery and could be considering graphic or triggering to some parents.  I actually think it's fascinating because it's so hard for most of us to imagine there's really ANYTHING problematic lurking behind that innocent, teeny tiny hole in their neck!  Thank you, Don, for sharing these incredibly personal photos.

Don writes:

My daughter just had the surgery today, at age 3.5, following recommendations to wait until anesthesia was less risky and before she went to school formally. My daughter had an opening in her neck.

I will need to admit first that my wife is a physician herself (ophthomology) and we live in the Baltimore area. This means we had access to knowledgeable parental judgement calls specifically for my daughter, and she was able to see a pediatric focused ENT at Johns Hopkins.

Now, my wife also had a branchial cleft cyst, without an opening and it ended up becoming infected around age 19. She had to undergo a speedy surgery. She did not get the right level of care at the time, because she was essentially premed, and one of the non-ENT surgeons she knew offered to do the it without charge. Because of the inflammation, they ended up getting too close to a nerve and she couldn’t feel her tongue for a month, although nothing returned.

The moral of the story is, in my opinion, to get it taken care of young, or else your child may have to deal with it with worse scarring later in life. Take the advice of a good, and not underworked ENT (so they won’t be trigger happy). Second, my daughter has larger tonsils, so there was a concern that she could have sleep apnea, and that the tonsils should come out too. She was recommended to do a sleep study, and even after watching many prep YouTube videos with my daughter, the sleep study was an amazing tramatic evening for my daughter. This was a couple weeks before the surgery, so going in, she was freaked out and it made the mental trauma of surgery even worse. So take good advice, and be warned that a sleep study is likely to make the before/after of the surgery worse.

PHOTOS: The surgery. Bottom right is the chin, and the bottom left is her left ear. Shows a double incision. First on top to cut out the opening of the tube/cyst. The second after they went up a ways cutting it out, located in a neck fold, to continue as far up as they could. In her case they cut it off at the tonsil, and the thought was that she shouldn’t have any recurrences from there. 

The bandage with a drain for 1 day