Doctor of the Year

Let’s talk Dr. Yang for a moment.  Dr. Ed Yang is what I consider to be a CDH master.  A large part of his life’s work is dedicated to the CDH birth defect.  In our case, Dr. Yang has followed Garrett from in-utero, through the present, and will do so until we get discharged I do believe.

 I don’t think he sleeps.  He stops by Garrett’s room once a day, in person, to check in on him.  He obviously used to be in our room more, but we are on the upside of our CDH battle so now we do not have the need to see him more than that.  After I delivered at St. Marys Hospital, he stopped by that evening to see me.  It had to be around 8:00 that night.  He told me he was going to stop back by Cardinal Glennon to see my husband & Garrett on his way home.  So who knows what time he got home that night.

Dr. Yang also did Garrett’s repair surgery…….thorascopically might I add, which used three tiny incisions.  Garrett’s scars are minuscule, and completely healed up at this point.  A lot of surgeons still make a large incision for CDH repairs; but not Dr. Yang.  He also performs operations on babies still in the womb with CDH to try to increase their chances of survival.  In our specific CDH case, the risks outweighed the benefits for the Tracheal Occlusion procedure.

With our initial CDH diagnosis I found 3 facilities in the US that I thought were the best for handling CDH babies.  One of the three was with Dr. Yang at Cardinal Glennon – so fortunate to live so close to St. Louis.  So hats off to you Dr. Yang, you obviously won the Doctor of Year award in our book!