Second opinions are worth it.

Second opinions are not only worth it but it's also a right. Sophia has seen a lot (a lot) of doctors in her short life, just in the delivery room there were four doctors from the NICU because we didn't know what to expect. Little by little we were adding specialists to our list: orthopedist, neurologist, ent doctor, audiologist, geneticist, cardiologist (who fortunately we don't see anymore as well as a pulmonologist) and most recently urologist and endocrinologist. We see all these doctors at the same place where Sophia was born, they know her medical history and most of them know her by name.
We never even thought about going to a different hospital, it always seemed like it made sense to have all her health care in one place and what the doctor suggested as treatment always made sense as well. Until now.

Sophia's orthopedist has performed her three hip surgeries. Sophia was born with hip dysplasia and the first surgery, which was done when she was just four months old, was supposed to fix that. But it didn't. A second surgery was done when she was three years old. It didn't work either. I said in a previous post that every time Sophia has a procedure done where she has to go under the anesthesia, she has a hard time keeping things down because of nausea and keeping her oxygen above 90. So when the orthopedist said we need to do a third surgery we had to wonder if we should put her through another surgery.  We wanted to be sure it was necessary. He did say this one was a bit different from the previous ones, but still we were nervous.

Are we going to put her in risk and over and over again? Is is really worth it? How is a third surgery going to affect our daughter?  Is this one going to work? We had these and many more questions to ask.
That's when my husband suggested a second opinion. I never thought about it and I don't know why. It just makes sense, it's my daughter we are talking about. I need to make sure that we are doing the right thing and asking for a second opinion would either confirm that or give us a new way to go.

And so we did. We talked to another doctor from a very prestigious hospital, he read and studied all of Sophia's records and images, he discussed the case with his colleagues and told us that what our orthopedist suggested makes sense and that he didn't think Sophia needed to go to a different place for the procedure. Ok, so he didn't tell us anything new but we needed to hear from a different doctor, besides I feel like this doctor explained a little bit better the cons and the pros and made us feel better about doing the surgery. In the end it's not that we didn't want to fix her dislocation but we wanted to make sure it was the right way to fix it.

So we are doing this! It's going to be hard, for Sophia and for us but we are doing it. We didn't get a different opinion from asking a second opinion and that's ok.  We, as parents, have the right to double check, to doubt and to make sure. It's our right.