Details of Dylan's Big Day

Another commonly asked question is : Will Dylan to straight into surgery?

The answer to this is: Your Guess is as good as ours!

The way it looks is that Dylan will not go directly into surgery. I will be laboring in the beautiful "Golden Gate Bridge View Room", then when I am close to delivering I will be moved into an OR. The reason I will be moved into an OR is because it is such a sterile environment and Dylan has organs outside of her body therefore she needs such an environment. After she is delivered they will pass her through what looks like a drive through window. On the other side of this window is a team of doctors and surgeons in another sterile environment. They will immediately place Dylan into a bowel bag. A bowel bag is a plastic bag (the same kind that they use on adults in the ER) that Dylan will literally be placed in. It will got up to her armpits and then kind of wrap it around her, this is to ensure that her organs stay moist and that they stay sterile. The nurses will clean Dylan up while the pediatric cardiology team assess her heart (every time they check it they say it is great, but they just want to be SURE), the pediatric surgery team will assess her intestines and general state in order to game plan their next moves, and the neonate team will be getting her into her isolette and move her into the NICU. At this point Casey and the grandparents will be leaving and going with Dylan to the NICU. I will be finishing labor in the OR.
If Dylan just had a few loops of her bowel out then she could go straight into surgery and they could do what is called an "enclosure surgery". They would assess that bowels to make sure that there is no atresia (endings, deadspots) and then insert the bowels into the body and sew her up. The baby would then be medically paralyzed in order to make sure she didn't move. Adults breathe with our lungs and our chest go in and out, whereas a baby breathes with their diaphragm going in and out of their belly. If she now has organs in there that she is not used to then she could squirm and be in pain or possibly stop breathing.
The most likely scenario is that she will not go into surgery for two weeks. From our last couple of Ultrasounds it looks like all of her large and small intestines are out of her body, as well as her liver. Her little body was not made with an empty whole to place all of these organs. Therefore the surgeons have to make room for her organs. They will place all of her external organs into a plastic bag that is known as a SILO. The only way that I can explain it is as a cake icing tube. They will place her organs in this and then a spring loaded piece is inserted into her opening. The bag is then suspended above her body. Gravity then does the rest. The nurses could twist down the bag a little everyday in order to get more to go into her body. This allows gravity to just create space for her organs. The doctors will then preform the surgery closing up her abdominal cavity.
If Dylan's intestines come out black that means that parts of them or all of them have died. She will then go into surgery very quickly. But during my current Ultrasounds they have detected great blood flow through the intestines which indicates that nothing has died. She could also have to go into surgery right away if her intestines stop at a certain point. As you know our intestines loop around and loop around, but if she has atresia this could mean that is just stops looping.
We are hoping that Dylan will not need this last surgery that I discussed. But you just never know!