handsful

Our Lainey girl is going in for surgery tomorrow.  #4 in her young life, and it won’t be her last.  Ah, the joys of clefts :)

Tomorrow’s procedure will either be a sphincter pharyngoplasty or pharyngeal flap.  Both basically help to lengthen her soft palate (which, when studied a couple of months ago, is too short) by using existing tissue to make a sort of flap.  The flap will help to close off her nasal cavity for certain sounds, which will allow her to produce sounds that require a build up of air pressure (say a “b”…feel it?) AND will help decrease the nasality in her speech.

We have BIG hopes for this surgery.  Lainey is extremely speech delayed… she has only a small number of consonants which means her speech is mostly vowels.  So, she’s very hard to understand…she still signs quite a bit to help clarify what she’s saying and we still often can’t understand.  She gets frustrated (but, not as much as you’d think) and we get frustrated.  She’s 4 1/2 and her thoughts are becoming more complex.  She wants to be able to TALK to us, beyond the simple day-to-day things.  We so desire that, too.

Our prayer is that this surgery gives her the anatomy that she needs to make big progress in speech therapy.  We’re not naive, thinking she’ll come out of anesthesia with all these brand, new sounds.  We know there is much work to be done.  But, to know that nothing structural is holding her back will be such a blessing!

If you think of her tomorrow (12:30 EST), say a prayer?  Thanks :)