Hospital Update - 1

Well, we're still in the city. They didn't send us home from pre-op. About an hour ago, the nurse called and said, "I need to let you know you've been bumped ..." and my heart sank! But the sentence continued, "... back half an hour. Check in at 7:00 tomorrow morning instead of 6:30." Whew!

Pre-op today was only about 3 hours. We were settled in at the Ronald McDonald House by 3:00. I can't say enough about how fantastic this place is for out-of-towners visiting the hospital for Big Stuff.

The layout for the day is about an hour of paper work and vital signs and drinking the "happy juice" and other surgery prep. Then at 8:00 we head down to meet up with the anesthesiologist. They're planning not to give an epidural, but just a caudal (sp?) in hopes of a shorter hospital stay and fewer complications. (I know some of you don't care about this stuff, but my mom the RN will want to know.) Putting Maggie to sleep and hooking up a bunch of the tubes will take about an hour. Then the surgeon gets to start.

They will remove the scar tissue from her previous surgery. The estimate is a whole hour just to cut through the sternum, due to the scarring. Then it will be "a few hours" to get ready to hook Maggie up to the bypass machine. The nurse explained that the scarring from the previous surgery is like unto throwing a whole bunch of glue into the chest cavity and letting it connect up organs and bones in odd and bizarre places. And they have to get all those parts straightened out and "unglued" before they can start work.

Around noon or 1:00, they should be ready to hook her up to the heart-lung machine. This may have to be done earlier, if what's inside is too much of a mess. But hopefully they'll have her on bypass for only about 40 minutes. That's how long it will take to actually sew in the new pulmonary artery. After the artery is connected, they'll begin the finishing-up part (another hour). The estimate for surgery is about six hours.

They hope to have the breathing tube out while she's still in OR. If she doesn't wake up well (which would be no surprise) they're still hoping to have it out by bedtime Tuesday. They anticipate that she should need no blood transfusions, but it will be available just in case.

Wednesday morning, they'll start pulling chest tubes and serving popsicles. They explained to her that she will have to get up and move on Wednesday, and cough, and do some other things that will hurt. They were honest that it would hurt, and told her that there would be pain medication to help but not eliminate the pain, and told her why she'd have to do these things to get better and avoid pneumonia.

The nurse told us that the anticipated hospital stay is 5-7 days, but there have been kids who go home as early as three days.

The blood draw was the worst part of the day. But we got her to relax a little and breath [breathing is GOOD], and then it hurt less. I hope the amnesiac drugs work as well this time as they did during her previous surgeries, because this time she's got fears and awareness that she didn't have before.

Boring information that only Mom will care about: BUN and creatinin were 14 and 0.6. I hope that makes you happy, Mom.