3-9mos - Learning to eat food and the Ear Infections

Luke's lip healed up great and the doctor told us the scar would remain pink for about a year before it would turn a whitish color. After a few weeks his lip did pull up a little but eventually relaxed back down as it should. Unfortunately, the perfect nose that they created didn't stay as perfect as right after surgery. It started to cave a little bit on the cleft side because of a lack of support. We were told that it would improve a little as he aged but as some point we would need more plastic surgery to make it normal. It wasn't enough to bother us though. Luke started to have issues with his ears shortly after the surgery. He got an infection that we couldn't get rid of. The tubes were working so we would just see pus running out of them that often smelled foul. After numerous antibiotics, flushing of his ears and a lot of trips to his ENT, it was determined that he had a Staph infection in his ear that he probably contracted during the surgery. We were down to either putting in a PIC line (permanent IV type thing) to try to kill the infection or we could try to take the tubes out in hopes that it would do the trick. We opted with #2 of course. So Luke was put out again for the 2nd time in his short life. This time was a lot less stressful as it only took about 20 min. The doctor took out the tubes and cleaned his ears really good and added antibiotic right in the ear during the surgery and it did the trick. Thank goodness as we were starting to get a little nervous. No one ever told us out loud but we would hear nurses whisper that he was the one with MRSA. I later found out that it can be a pretty scary infection. The plan was to try to go without tubes for a few months and see how he did before we put more back in. He made it until about 9 months old and we needed a new set to get the fluid cleared out. This time we used a different type tube material in hopes that the bacteria or whatever might not stick to it as easily. He did great and they worked without any problems. In the meantime, Luke had begun to eat baby food. That was an interesting process as the hole in his palate often let food up in his nose. It was always a huge blowout whenever he would sneeze. He would often just have food oozing out his nose during his feedings but overall that wasn't really that hard. He liked food and got more in than came out which was all we needed.