The subject of having surgery early so there is no memory of pain was brought up in this thread so I thought I would add something to that topic.

I should say right away that I have a 2 1/2 year old son, so I have not had to face the difficult decision of these surgeries. However, we did face another potentially controversial surgery question that some say is consmetic and others say is necessary. Before my son was born, before we had any idea he had CAH, I did a fair amount of research in attempting to decide if we should have him circumcised. I read about a study(and I wish at the time I would have realized how important it would become and have saved the cite to it; if anyone else knows where I can find this again I would love the info). Anyway, the study was on the "memory" of pain in infants and young children.

The study was conducted on 2 sets of boy children. One set had been circumcised without anethesia, the other set had not been circumcised. The boys were then hooked up and monitored while they received their immunizations. I can't remember everything they monitored but it was things like breathing, sweating, crying, heart rate, blood pressure etc. The boys all wore pants/diapers so there is no way the people administering the test (or reading the results) knew who had been circumcised and who hadn't. The results of the monitoring showed the circumcised boys all "felt" the pain of immunizations more (and more to a statistically significant amount). Their pysiological response to the pain was much greater than the uncircumcised boys. The researchers hypothesized that the brains of these kids did have a memory of their earlier pain. The pathways carrying the "pain" messages were imprinted more than the uncircumcised boys. To me this means that while a child may not  have a conscious memory of a surgery, or the words to describe it, they do feel and remember pain.