Expanders

A happy presurgery Emily

This will be a short post for those of you interested in what the expanders looks like.  I tried to get the best camera angle so that the outlines of the expanders are visible.  Since they only have around 70 ml of saline in them they are tough to see in a photo.  That will change fairly quickly as we start the weekly fills.

As Amy mentioned before she has two 500 ml expanders.  One is on the left side of her back and the other is on the upper right side that angles to the middle of her side.  The positioning is important because during the expansion and removal process features may be pulled or pushed out of their original location creating a new visual difference.  In Emily’s case if an expander was placed on her front there may be a situation that during the process one of her breasts gets pulled down.  Then she would have to endure another surgery to put it back where it was supposed to be. 

There are also 2 drains that you will see that are there to remove the fluid that the body is sending to the area.  These will hopefully be removed by the end of the week when they are to longer needed. 

The pictures are below.  They aren’t bad, but you will see the sutures and drainage tubes coming out near the expanders.



 

 

Here you see both expanders on her back.  They are small now but will get very large. 
Especially relative to her small body

 

Right expander.  This one will start to restrict her arm after a couple weeks.

You can see a little more definition of the expander in this photo.
 

We also had a smaller satelite removed now because it only required an excision. 
This is the only satelite we are removing.