Luke's First Cranial Surgery

Apr 17, 2016
1 min read

The past month has been rough for Luke as he had to have another nasal dilation at the end of March. He had stents in his nose for 2 days which will help him breathe a little easier. Here are a couple of pictures from that surgery.

10326161_1460672130.7741_funddescription
10326161_1460672312.5072_funddescription

Here are a couple of pictures after his surgery.

12799425_1573444302965713_3166665143391760842_n
10326161_1460677524.4566_funddescription

Less than 2 weeks after Luke got home, he had an appointment to have his intracranial pressure checked. The method used is completely non invasive by running a test called a VEP, or Visual Evoked Potential, where black and white squares are flashed on a screen in front of Luke and they hook up electrodes all over his head to basically measure how long it takes for the signal to travel from his eye to his brain. The results from this test were not good, so the ophthalmologist needed to look closer at Luke's optic nerve, which is a key indicator of increased intracranial pressure.

After looking closely at his optic nerve, it was decided by multiple specialists that Luke needed a craniectomy, which is where they will go in and cut out the fused suture. On Luke, that would be his coronal suture, which runs from across the top of his head, from the top of the sphenoid bone to the sphenoid bone on the other side of his skull.

The surgery was scheduled for 4 hours, but Luke's excellent team of surgeons were able to do everything that they needed to do in under 2.5 hours. Here are pictures from that surgery.