With a few short sentences, he had dropped into our laps one of the biggest decisions we may ever have to make. But since she had many of the characteristics indicating a poor chance at bowel control the question was much more difficult. We were already familiar with the colostomy. We had become pretty successful at it's management and in some ways, it seemed easier than dealing with the dirty diapers that most parents dealt with. The pull-through procedure, however, was a foreign entity.
Education Talk to the right people.
The single most important thing we did was find the right surgeon. The statistics that a surgeon quotes when talking about the potential for a good outcome are based on the performance of a technically correct operation. If the surgeon is inexperienced or technically deficient, those statistics are highly optimistic. This is not a surgery that every surgeon learns. Ask the surgeon if he has had special training, how many of these surgeries they've performed and what the outcomes were.