Lucas Camilo

Last Friday Lucas had another surgery, his second in just over a month. This time the main focus was extracting teeth, but as long as he was under anesthesia the surgeons also went ahead and replaced his ear tubes. We actually didn’t know until 24 hours before check-in whether it was actually going to happen because our insurance denied the dental portion of the procedure. After lots of calls and messages and unhelpful conversations we finally figured out that it was necessary to submit the paperwork to a separate dental subsidiary of our main insurance carrier (would have been nice if they said that in the denial letter!) and that pre-authorization wasn’t required. Sigh. Someday we’ll elect a socialist and have a single-payer healthcare system… but until then I guess we’ll keep spending hours a month dealing with bullshit private insurance companies.

Anyway, we assumed the surgery was relatively straightforward and so weren’t too worried about it. But then it took almost two hours, and we found out later why: they extracted a total of 13 TEETH! Myotubular myopathy has effected Lucas’s mouth in funky ways, including having adult teeth come in early and baby teeth not fall out. So in order to avoid painful crowding they had to remove some teeth… we just didn’t realize quite how many.

Meanwhile, he had the small tubes in his ears replaced. They help drain fluid that builds up behind the ear, thereby preventing hearing loss. We’re happy to not have Lucas yelling “what?!?” as often now that the procedure is out of the way.

Over the weekend Lucas was definitely in recovery mode, resting a lot and hardly getting up in his wheelchair to go out. He also had a lot of swelling in one side of his face, leading to his temporary nickname, “the half squirrel.”

By Monday morning Lucas was well enough to head off to camp. Here’s his report so far…

Aquarium camp day 3

This week I am at camp at the aquarium.

Yesterday each of us made puzzle pieces of a six-gill shark.

Today we put them together to make a very complicated six gill shark puzzle.

I looked at phytoplankton and zooplankton on video.

Everyone else looked at plankton under a microscope.

We saw dogfish in the Underwater Dome.

A marine biologist talked to us about six gill sharks.