That's because the space between her ribs didn't line up exactly with the deepest point of her depression, Nuss says. Nuss secures the bar, with its ends now fitted into Hillary's chest, by wrapping muscles around it near the side incisions. He begins stitching up the cuts. We've lost nothing. Hillary will wear the bar for two or three years to make sure her breastbone stays in place.
Doctors then remove it in an outpatient surgery.
After surgery, patients often are back to normal activities in a month, compared to at least three months with the older surgery. This way is analogous to having braces on your teeth. Nuss' surgery is changing the way doctors think about correcting sunken chest in children. While Nuss started using it on patients in 1987, he didn't widely publicize it until recently, when he had more than 10 years of data. Outside CHKD, many surgeons are cautiously optimistic, says Arnold Koran, a Michigan surgeon and chairman of the American Academy of Pediatrics' surgery section.