We took Graham to see a neurosurgeon at Duke on Wednesday. In short, he has cervical stenosis and dysplasia of the skull base and will most likely need surgery at some point but they want to wait until he is older. His bones are still growing and developing and babies do not tolerate the surgery well. It is another wait as long as we can as long as he is doing well kind of game, except this time we could be waiting several years. We will take him in for periodic MRIs and watch for symptoms such as loss of use or movement of arms and legs. General anesthesia is risky for Graham because while asleep his head could move too far back and cause problems. (Of course we didn't know this the last 3 times he went under anesthesia. Thank you, Lord, for protecting him!) The doctor thinks that they can do this new quick scan MRI that only takes 2 minutes, so Graham will not have be sedated. Hopefully they will be able to get the picture they need this way. We take him back in 3 months (August 20) for this quick MRI and a check-up with the neurosurgeon.
The doctor said he is not in any immediate danger. We should go about life as usual. It is possible that as he grows things could improve but the doctor seemed to think it is unlikely that it would completely go away. But we are praying that the Lord would heal his spine and heal his eyes and that he would protect him daily.
Here are some of the MRI pictures.
If you look closely you can see an arrow point to the top of the
spinal column and you can see the narrowing of the spinal cord.
In this first picture you can see the white area surrounding a gray circle. That is the spinal cord where it is not pinched. In the second picture you can see that the spinal cord is pinched.
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