Ella’s head is much firmer now and she seems to be directing it to the direction she wants it to go. This makes holding her much easier. Up until recently she was decidedly floppy and enormous care needed to be given otherwise her head would just flop over if you leaned in one direction when holding her. Another discovery is that you can wake her up by calling her name. She opens her eyes and kind of looks around. What is not yet happening is her tracing the source of sound. If you make a noise, it doesn’t seem like she can detect where it is coming from and face it.
Tomorrow we are meeting with Dr. Mulken. He is a well known Craino-Facial plastic surgeon. We don’t expect him to suggest any action right now but we want to get an idea of when things are usually done. From reading other kids case studies, it sounds like the first procedure Ella will go through will be a thing called ‘de-bulking’, namely removing some tissue on the right side of her face in an attempt to make it more symmetrical. Gaul spent a long time today sitting with Ella and describing his latest conquest having to do with a computer game. Ella responded by making a much higher than average number of cute noises as if responding to his drone. Cooincidence? I don’t think so.