Today we did the consultation at the Kinderspital for Eden’s surgery. They want to wait two more weeks so that the inflammation has time to go down. The surgery will happen in mid-May. Pretty soon they will mail us the day that works out–but they won’t mail us the time. We need to show up on the appointed day, and it will be used as preparation time. They’ll explain what we need to know, and give us a vague idea about the time of the surgery. Then Elisa and Eden will spend the night. The surgery will be sometime on the second day. They want to keep her under observation for a day, so she’ll need to spend the night again. What a looong three days.

The doctors were more specific about what caused the infection. Eden has a little cyst right in the area of the thyroid, by the Adam’s apple. In primitive times, the thyroid evolved by dropping down from the tongue. There is still a vestigial canal that traces this route. In modern humans, this canal closes up in fetuses and never serves any purpose. But Eden’s stayed open. The canal filled with fluid and formed a cyst. Then germs entered from the mouth. And that’s what caused the infection. The surgeon joked that the problem comes from the time when Eden had gills. So the surgeon has to remove the cyst, and then remove as much of the canal as Eden has, possibly up to her mouth. The canal and the cyst are anchored in bone, so the strip of bone has to be removed too. If they leave the bone, then the canal and the cyst could grow back out of it. It’s the same bone where the throat muscles are attached, but they are only connected to the left and right sides, so the center of the bone serves no purpose. The whole condition is described perfectly in Wikipedia and in this conference presentation.

The doctors still say that the surgery isn’t dangerous. But it is practically guaranteed to leave a scar. And it’s too bad the poor little thing has to do a surgery at all, along with the general anesthesia.