Reconsidering Surgery

The date is fast approaching for Maggie's pre-op MRI. Her pharyngeal surgery is scheduled for mid-August. In the last few days, it has crossed my mind that she's not hard to understand anymore.

She came out of her heart surgery with her voice very hypernasal, as it was prior to her cleft-palate surgery years ago. After waiting several weeks, expecting improvement and finding very little, we made an appt with the ENT. By the time we saw him a month later, her voice had improved just a tiny bit. By the time we attended the Cleft Palate Clinic, nearly four months later, she was doing better yet. They discovered she does again have a hole in her palate, presumably something that changed as she's been growing. But now, here we are, three months later, and noticing that we seldom have to ask her to repeat herself. We usually understand what she says.

This may be because we are family and we've become used to less-than-stellar speech habits. I asked Anthea on Sunday how she was hearing Maggie, and she thought Maggs sounded perfectly understandable. When Nathan called today with happy news about a successful job hunt, Maggie answered. He thought it was me; he thought she was entirely understandable.

So here's my question. All you friends and family members who have chatted with Maggie in the last month, what do you think? If you were at the wedding or at CCA, did you notice any difficulty in catching what Maggie was saying to you? If you talked with her, and did NOT notice anything odd about her speech, if you did not have to puzzle out something she was saying, it would be very helpful to hear that. But don't be "nice" and say she sounds fine if she doesn't; that would just lead us down the wrong path.