Darah just turned three this month but she had her third surgery this morning. In February of 2008 she had a myringotomy, more commonly known as “putting tubes in the ears”. That didn’t go as well as we had thought at the time because today’s surgery was to repair a hole left in her right ear drum from the original procedure.
Back in March doctors noticed that one of the holes caused by her tubes did not close up as expected. Apparently the odds of this happening are about 1 in 250 and lucky Darah was the 1. A hearing test confirmed that her eardrum was “flatline”, which didn’t mean that she couldn’t hear, but did mean that she had “an undertermined amount of hearing loss” in that ear.
Today’s repair surgery was a myringoplasty (or tympanoplasty?). It seemed to go well this morning, but then again so did the first one. The doctors took fat from behind her ear and grafted it into the hole. For the next several weeks, until the graft fuses with the ear drum, Darah’s hearing will be like as if somebody jammed some cotton balls into her ear – and she doesn’t like it! She’s been fussy and crying since waking up from anesthesia, and constantly pulling at her ear. It’s going to take some time for her to get used to the feeling but hopefully this will fix the problem once and for all and we won’t have to go in for any more ear surgeries.
