The amazing people at Shriner's hospital can not be acknowledged enough for the humanitarian work they do. The facility was amazing and our Surgeon, Dr. Tony Scaduto was the best around.

Spencer was given an infusion of platelets to prepare him for surgery. Although his platelets had stabilized, he still runs significantly lower than the rest of us and will for the rest of his life.

The waiting was horrendous. The surgery went way longer than planned. When all was said and done, Dr Scaduto came and spoke to us. "Your son has very interesting knees" was once again the statement we got.

As it turns out, the amputation went just fine. The issue that arose was that, as they attempted to starighten Spencer's remaining leg, the blood flow in his foot dropped to an unacceptable level. Every time they tried to straighten it, blood flow dropped.

The solution for the moment was to install an "External Fixator" which is essentially large metal bars with adjustment screws and nuts that sit outside the leg and have pieces that go through the skin and are screwed onto the bone. This is a horrible piece of equipment. But the idea is that they could slowly adjust it over a period of months to try to get the leg to straighten while allowing whatever was restricting the blood flow to re-adjust to the new position.

I won't go into extreme detail here. Suffice it to say that the next months were filled with doctor's visits, cleaning the spots where the fixator went through the skin and pushing the skin down so it wouldn't grow up the fixator. Doug Powell deserves several medals of honor for braving this process.

Phantom pains. Wow do those suck. Spencer was mostly moved around in a plastic wagon filled with pillows given that his remaining leg was fairly straight. There was a lot of pain medication and a lot of sleepless nights, mostly for Jenn & Doug.

After a few months and several "adjustments" to try to straighten the leg, it just was not working. I don't think any of us want to repeat that year. Finally it was determined that a second amputation was the way to go.

Spencer was all for it. He was tired of the pain and just wanted to get rid of that remaining leg which was no longer doing him any good. The journey continued...