Megan update

We visited with Megan's new cleft team at Primary Children's Hospital on Monday. It's hard to switch doctors after working with the team at Riley since she was born, but we had heard good things about the doctors here and decided to give 'em a shot. We visited with the plastic surgeon, ENT, speech therapist, and dentist. After all was said and done I would say we felt comfortable with the new team and what they had to tell us. We do like the facilities at Riley better, but we can deal with it :) I think we will need to find somewhere for the other kids to go for her future appointments though, since there just is not enough room for everyone in the exam rooms. 

So here's what we learned. When you talk, your soft palate separates your mouth and nose to keep air from coming out your nose. When you have a cleft palate, often times this doesn't work as well as it's supposed to. This is what is happening when Megan talks. A couple of the doctors demonstrated for us with a small dental type mirror under her nostril. They had her say a few words and we watched the mirror fog up as she spoke. When we got to the speech therapist she had Megan wear a "nasometer" which is basically a headset with two microphones on it--one by her nose and one by her mouth, separated by a flat piece of plastic. As she spoke a series of different sounds into it, we could see on the computer how much air was coming out of her mouth and how much of it was coming out of her nose. It looks a little funny, but it was pretty cool and Megan says she liked wearing the thing and talking to the computer. 

So what does this mean? It means we get to go back down sometime in the near future for another appointment. They want to do a naso-endoscopy on Megan. They will stick a small camera (about the size of spaghetti they tell us) up through her nose (after using a numbing spray) and see what is really going on back there. After they see what's happening when she talks, they will know what the next steps are. It may mean she just needs some speech therapy, or it may mean another surgery. We will just see what happens. The speech therapist did seem very positive about how well Megan talks and all the different sounds she is making. All things considered, she does a great job!

The dentist also talked with us about the possibility of future surgeries down the road including, but not limited to adjusting her jaw, as well as other adjustments to her face to get things lined up just right. We aren't going to worry about that just yet because she still has some growing to do first. For now we will focus on speech issues. 

Megan tends to be very shy/stubborn with the doctors so Matt bribed her ahead of time, telling her that if she talks to the doctors and does what they ask, we would get ice cream afterward. Well, she took it to heart and she sure did a great job! She answered all their questions, opened her mouth, said all the funny phrases they asked her to say. What a good girl. Needless to say, she earned her ice cream!!

While we were in Utah we were able to visit with Julie's brothers Alan and Neal and Alan's fiancé Jenny. It was great to spend some time with them, as it doesn't happen very often :) And we also visited Matt's grandparents in SLC. The kids haven't spent much time with their great grandparents so it was great to spend some time with them as well. Didn't get a picture of the uncles but here's one at Grandma and Grandpa's.