ATTENTION MEDIA & OTHERS SEEKING INTERVIEWS!
If you represent a media company, are a student writing a report or anyone interested in interviewing our visitors, please seek permission (see email address at the bottom of the page) before posting your requests or emailing solicitations for any talk show, magazine, thesis, census or other interview on any message board on this site. If not, your posts WILL be removed. Please respect the privacy of our members.
My daughter is 15 (CAH). Her first surgery was at 3 mo.s old (clitoris reduction) and the they went on from there. When she was born she had ambigous genitalia, pretty much looked like a circumsized male . Her urologist tried a new technique for the first time which did not work so well. At age 2, the next step was stretching vaginal tissuse with saline injections in inserted ballons to create extra skin to create the inner and outer labias. Then the vaginal opening was created. This is when the problems began. UTI after UTI. The scare tissuse would close the vaginal opening and her uteras would fill with infection . She would scream in pain and she could not have a bowel movement either because she was so full of infection that it pressed on her bowel. The fevers were constant (so high), stress dosing, morphine for pain, blue lips, endless hospital stays. The urologist would take her back into surgery and open the vaginal opening again. She would have a vaginal cathater inserted for 3-4 days at a time to drain the infection into a bag. I would drive her 20 miles each day to have her primary MD dilate her vagina to keep the opening open. Then we began to skip days and then weeks of dilation and once again the opening would grow closed. At age 5, I remember telling her urologist that I could not take this anymore and nor could my child and made it quite clear that he had better fix it . He did !!!She has been fine since but for the occassional UTI. I would wait if I had the choice again. Don't make a problem where one does not exist. If there was a medical reason, then I would consider it. As far as emotional , my child remembers and can tell you about not having control over what was done to her. The hospital that she had the surgery done at is a teaching hospital. My child was photographed and put on display for all the urology interns. Twice yearly visits cont. as she aged until about 10 yrs old. The urologist wanted to see how his work progressed as she aged. I had my reservations but I wanted to make sure that there were going to be good doctors out there someday. Her urologist has since retired and there is no ped's MD within 200 miles of where we live in upsate NY. Good luck with what ever you chose.