Later that evening, we met up with Eric and Becca down at the plaza to go out for supper. We had decided on Buca di Beppo for supper with a followup cheese cake from the Cheese Cake factory for the ladies that wanted it. It was Reis' first real experience at a restaurant, which he seemed to do fairly well.When we finished eating, we walked around for awhile enjoying the plaza for the night. We headed over to the fountains and took a few more pictures and the gals decided that it was time to go get their cheese cake, though I don't know how anyone would be hungry after the feast that we had at Buca. After stopping at the Cheese Cake Factory, we decided we had better get headed back to the RMH so we could hit the sack and be ready for the next morning.
The next morning came and we all hurried around to get over to the hospital, which was just across the street. This proved to be a little bit harder than any of us had thought. We ended up walking pretty much all the way around the hospital on the wrong side, and then ended up going into the ER door because we were pushing time as it was and didn't want to be late. It took us a good 30 minutes to get from the RMH to the correct floor where he would have his first clinic.
The clinic was setup a little like, first come, first serve. We had to check in at the front desk and wait for them to call us. After about 30 minutes of waiting or so, a nurse called our names and we followed her down to a lower floor where we were set to see the surgeon. We then waited a few minutes in that waiting room and were called back to weigh and measure Reis. It was all really kind of confusing for us and several nurses came in and back out. We first talked with Amanda, the nurse practitioner, then with Beth and Margie who are the surgeon's nurses. They asked all kinds of questions and asked us if we had questions, which we did, but at the time couldn't remember what all to ask. Finally we got to meet Dr. Singhal, the plastic surgeon that would be working on Reis. He is a very nice man, very quite spoken. He held Reis for a minute or two and looked him over and asked us if we had questions. We asked several questions about how many surgeries Reis would have to have and about eating and everything else that we could think of and he was pretty straight forward with us. He told Beth to contact Dr. Fales, a pediatric dentist in Olathe, KS, to see if we could see him that same day since we lived so far away. Dr. Fales makes the appliance that we would get for Reis to act as a temporary palate. This device was called a palatal expander, and is designed to re-shape the palate and bring the premaxilla forward for better results when they do the surgeries. When we were done with the questions he told us that he would see us again in a few months for his pre-operation appointment. Beth and Margie then showed us how to do the Lip Taping that we would have to do for the next 4 months. The lip taping seemed pretty easy and once you got the hang of it, it was pretty easy. Beth had contacted Dr. Fales and they were going to see us around 2:00 that day.When we were finished seeing the surgeon, we headed back up to the clinic waiting room to wait to see the audiologist and the nutritionist. After another small wait in the clinic, we were invited back to a room where we met the nutritionist. She asked several questions about how his feeding was going and we let her know that the feeding was going pretty well. We finished talking to the nutritionist and she called in the audiologist.
The audiologist did a couple of hearing test, and then decided that he needed an ABR (Auditory Brainstem Respons). This test seem to take forever. They hooked several wires up to Reis and she had her laptop recording what his brain was sending back through to the computer. After what seemed like hours, but really only about 1 hour, the test was finished. The results were pretty much what we had expected to hear since he had failed his other test. She said that he had some slight hearing loss in his left ear but was ok in his right ear. The loss in his left ear might be from the fluid that was in his middle ear and she told us she wanted to do another test at some point when we were back out for something else. As the test was finishing up, the 2 moms headed back over to the RMH to get everything packed up since it was getting close to 1:00 and we were supposed to be in Olathe by 2:00.We finished up at the clinic and hurried back over to the RMH to help get everything packed up and then we took off towards Olathe to go see Dr. Fales. We arrived right around 2:00 at Dr. Fales' clinic and they were there waiting for us.
It was kind of nice, because they weren't really open because he normally does his surgery on Friday, but since we lived so far away, they agreed to see us to get Reis fitted for his expander. Dr. Fales and Konnie, the practice administrator were very nice and happy to see us and to meet Reis. They had us keep Reis in his car seat and they got ready to create a mold of his mouth, which was very painful looking but didn't last long and surprisingly was perfect on the first try. They finished that up and let us know that we would need to come out about a week later to pick it up.After leaving Dr. Fales', we were all starved by that time since we hadn't ate anything, so we decided to grab a quick bite. After lunch, we did some other shopping and then headed for home.
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