The Crazy Crabtree's: 2012

So... many if not most of you know that Kayla was born with a kind of tumor in her face. It is basically like a water balloon under her skin that fills up with fluid. She has had surgery to remove this tumor about 3 or 4 times since she was 16 months old. The problem is that even though they keep taking the tumor out, it can always grow back. Well, guess what? About 2 months ago, it started growing back. Unfortunately, it likes to grow up into her eye socket, and once it decides to grow... it grows FAST! So just over one weekend, she went from having a little bit of tissue in her eye (which is pretty much always there) to having a huge red ball of tissue protruding from her eye... Her teachers at school were horrified to see her and they kept telling me she couldn't be at school. (they thought she had pink eye or some kind of infection...) Even after I brought in a doctors note they kept calling me and complaining about it. In the meantime, we were taking her in to see her Ophthalmologist, who was monitoring her eye and the tumor (we were waiting b/c sometimes the fluid will slowly recede back out of her eye and it goes back to normal) but it was only getting bigger, so he referred us to an Occulo-plastic surgeon. (this is the doctor that did Kayla's first eye surgery when she was 16 months old, right before we moved to Seattle.) Brian took her in to the appointment and came home scheduled for surgery. Now if you have known us for long, you know that Kayla's first surgery was a HUGE disaster... This surgeon severed the connective tissue in her right eye lid and it has never looked right since. I was torn... I didn't want to let him do another surgery on Kayla ever again... in fact I had promised myself that we would never let him operate on her again... and here we were scheduled for surgery with him!! Just last year we had refused to let him do surgery to remove a blood clot from behind her eye. We were so adamant about staying away from this particular surgeon that we put Kayla through a craniotomy (brain surgery) instead!! So, I prayed and prayed about it... I thought and pondered and prayed some more about what I should do... You can't imagine how much pressure it is to make decisions like this for someone you love so much. I knew putting her through another brain surgery was hugely risky, that is a SERIOUS surgery!! But I worried that we would have another botched surgery if we went in through her eye... botched surgeries are bad, but when it is right in the middle of your face, its especially tough because there is no way to hide the scars! So after all my thinking and praying and pondering I couldn't deny that I felt better about going through with the eye surgery and staying away from the brain surgery. No question I had doubts... was I just being lazy not wanting to get a second opinion from her brain surgeon?? Was I just in denial?? But I stuck with what I felt was the right thing to do, and on Friday Feb 24th in she went to have surgery on her eye... It was a quick surgery and she did great (except after surgery... Kayla doesn't tolerate anesthesia very well, so she was trying her hardest to kick the nurses in the face) She's home now and I was amazed when I saw her. The surgeon didn't even make an incision!! She has 2 stitches under her eye about half way between her cheek and her eye and of course there is a lot of swelling and bruising, but the swelling is already going down a little. The first day her eye was swollen shut tight, and now there is already a small crack where you can see into her eye. It's still going to take several weeks to heal and get back to looking normal, but she is already acting like her old self... dancing around the house singing and playing, giggling and racing with the other kids... She is our miracle!!