Surgery Day and God Answers Prayers!

Well, here we sit on the other side. The other side of one of the longest days of our lives. It is difficult waiting and waiting and waiting knowing that your child is face down on some crazy apparatus for hour after hour and not really knowing if things are going as intended. However, we were fairly relaxed and trusting God that He would do what is best for Emma. (Romans 8:28)
We arrived here at the hospital at 6:30 am and were quickly seen by several different Dr's and nurses and the monitoring team. (They put markings on her head to later attatch electrodes to that they use to monitor Emma's spine function. Essentially to make sure her spine is still passing signals to all of her body parts.) She was so brave this time and was able to say goodbye to us in that area. Then the long day of surgery began.
While Emma was in surgery Keith and I walked, talked, shopped for a few things for Emma, waited in the waiting room, found out it would be longer, drank coffee, walked some more, read everyones messages of encouragement. (What a blessing to us! )
Emma surgeon came out to speak to us at 6:40pm or so. (We had said goodbye to her at about 7:45 am. and she was done at 6:30pm) Long surgery. Emma's surgeon is a superstar! We know that it was a very intense and long day for him too but he still came out
to speak to us like we were the first people he talked to that day! He told that everything went very, very well. He said that he thought she would be pleased with the results because her chest and shoulder blade deformity should be much less pronounced. The reason the surgery took so much longer irs because some of her vertebra were naturally fused solid, which we already knew, but removing some of that bone and separating them was more involved than he had anticipated having to go all the way around the vertebral colomn. As you can imagine this takes place right around the spinal chord so they had to move very slowly. There were no problems with her monitoring and he is happy with the results so far.

We finally got to see Emma in recovery at about 7:45 or so. She actually looked much better than after her last surgery though her face was very puffy. So puffy that she couldn't open her eyes without using her hands to open them. She was very frustrated by this because she really wanted to see us. The morphene also makes everything blurry. She also had great Angelina Jolie lips. The swelling has gone way down today. :) It was also difficult to talk.

Emma has done very well changing positions through the night and she has even sat up with physio this morning. Everyone is very pleased with her progress.

I am doing fine but suffering from a great amount of sleep deprivtion but I know that the Lord will sustain me through this too. Keith will be coming back today to stay with us.

God has been compassionate and gracious towards our family! We couldn't have asked for a better outcome and Emma is doing so, so well. We are so thankful to the Lord and all he has done. Our  (and your) prayers have been answered in the most amazing way! We are acutely aware that God may have not answered our prayers in the way we had wanted but HE did! May He be glorified in all of this.

"I will give thanks to you, O Lord, among the peoples; I will sing praises to you among the nations. For you steadfast love is great above the heavens; your faithfulness reaches to the clouds."  Psalm 108:3&4

ps. I think Emma is a little taller now. ;)