Gabriella Elizabeth Gentry is the newest member of our family. She was born on the 21st of June 2004. Shortly after her birth we learned of her medical conditions – the most serious being a heart defect that required open-heart surgery.
That surgery was successfully completed on 21 September 2004 at the Lucille Packard Children’s Hospital (LCPH) – Stanford University Medical Center. Less than a month later, Ella and our family returned to Hawaii.
Unfortunately, additional medical issues remained. Ella’s airway was damaged by the intubation tube used during her heart surgery. On 10 November, Ella underwent surgery to remove the scar tissue that was restricting airflow in her airway. Although a 02 December surgical evaluation of the repairs showed her airway was healing properly, a 19 January 05 evaluation showed her airway had once again narrowed.
A tracheostomy was performed on 19 January 2005. The laser surgery to repair Ella’s airway was repeated on March 9th. Since then, Gabriella has made three visits to the operating room for visual inspections of the repair site. The last visit, on 20 April, revealed the March 9th laser surgery to repair her airway was failing. On 27 April, a plastic stent (hollow plastic tube) was placed into the narrowing portion of her airway. (Originally, this update remained at top of our web page – Noted: Dec 2008)
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