So off to Denver we go, with the clothes on our backs. There wasn't enough time to stop by the house to pick up a few things. I didn't even have my pocket book! The checkbook and all of the credit cards were at home too. Between my husband and myself, I think we had about $10.00 on us. Clint had on these real funny looking "bunny" boots that went way up past his knees, and the typical military issue cold weather attire. This wasn't happening. This was someone else's nightmare.
We arrived at the Children's Hospital about 10:00 p.m. The neurosurgeon was there to meet us. He had stayed up to greet us. After nearly 10 hours, someone was finally telling us what was going on. He told us that She would need a shunt to relieve the pressure in her head. He looked at her films that we had brought with us and ordered another CT scan for 6:00 am. He told us that he was planning a late morning -early-afternoon surgery. Clint called my mom in Oregon and she caught the next flight out. He was at the airport picking up my mother while Kori was in surgery. He took the bus. Mom had to rent the car since she was the only one who didn't leave home without her credit cards! (Yay for Mom)!! I can still feel the intense pain in my heart even today that I felt when I handed Kori over to the nurses before her surgery. I was so scared.
After the surgery I talked with the doctor and he said that she fought the anesthesia; that was a good sign in his opinion. She was tiny, only 11 pounds, but she was a fighter. Most important of all: he told me that this was nothing that I could have done to her; she was born like that. She has what they call acqueductal stenosis. She recovered beautifully from her surgery and after 5 days we returned home to Rapid City.
After we arrived home, my husband tried every trick in the book to get us moved to another base where we could be closer to a major medical center. She seemed to do all right after she had the shunt put in. She started to behave like a perfect little baby. We even flew to Grammy's house in Oregon three weeks after her surgery. We stayed with Grammy for a month and had a real good time.
When she was four months old, fluid started to collect in her head again. I took her to the clinic on the base and the doctor called her surgeon in Denver. He wanted us to fly her there so he could see her ASAP! The doctors on the base didn't feel that it was needed because her ventricles hadn't enlarged and she wasn't critical. If we wanted to go to Denver, it would be at our own expense, and if she was hospitalized that too would be on us. She wasn't critical, so we decided to wait. We knew that we would be moving in the next month anyway. We just didn't know where. I can remember taking her in for her 6-month check up the day before we left South Dakota. I asked the doctor why her head felt like J-ELLO when I would lie her back and why did she have a pocket of fluid that would accumulate in the middle of her chest between her breasts. I will NEVER forget his response: "I don't know."
We moved to Hampton, Virginia over Memorial Day weekend in 1993. She was just barely 6 months old. It took me a month to get an appointment with a new doctor. He walked into the room and took a good look at her and says that her shunt was malfunctioning. Finally! Someone who didn't think that I was over-reacting or being paranoid! She had some x-rays taken. Just a simple x-ray showed that her shunt had disconnected. The fluid was still flowing out of her head, it was just flowing along the shunt tract, and not through the tubing itself. She had her shunt repaired on July 23, 1993 at the Children's Hospital of the King's Daughters, in Norfolk, Virginia. She was almost eight months old. Again she recovered well from the surgery, and after three days she was discharged from the hospital. She has been fine ever since! She was very rarely ill as an infant. I didn't even know what an ear infection was until I had my third child.
She has never received any early intervention or any special therapies. She has 1 brother, and two younger sisters. We truly have been blessed.
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