In an effort to stay awake I did some journalistic work and bring you "almost" live pictures of our girl.
She's going to stay asleep the rest of the day and they'll start weaning off the anesthetics tomorrow morning we hope. Still too soon to tell for sure, but it looks like she's already benefiting from the surgery. Things have calmed down, gone in the right direction, moved at the right speed...all those things our bodies do and we absolutely take it for granted!
Bottom line is the heart surgery did help her pulmonary hypertension from what we can tell at this point. Hopefully with time she'll have the chance to totally heal from the ph and turn a corner to total health. For now the closing did not make it worse which was a small possibility. Other things we'd like to not think about anymore:
1- The extremely candid answer by the surgeon at 6:45 this morning when I asked "how many cases do you see of this seriousness of pulmonary issues when you go in to operate" and he said "none". Oh my, Ellie and her trail blazing. Talk about the ground shaking at that moment! He said the truth is he always fixes the kids with "just heart conditions" or if they have PH it's already responding to drugs by the time he goes in for the repair. He measured the pressures with the hole totally closed and was most pleasantly surprised. The plan was to leave a tiny hole as an emergency place for blood to escape if the lungs totally backed up with fluid but that did not happen in his test during the operation.
2- Only about 30 min after the surgery started the loud (very loud) alarms went off for "Code Blue in the OR". That's "someone is crashing in the operating room" to you and me. I grabbed the arm of my seat as if I was on a roller coaster ride (are we not?) and only 10 seconds later it was "cancelled" probably from the button accidentally getting pushed.
Having said all that, things are now very smooth and calm for our girl and we are enjoying seeing her sleeping peacefully.
Jeff and I only had a few minutes of downtime between people coming to check on us from Ellie's team.
There is Ellie with her baby doll and her cozy afghan. A tube is draining extra blood from her heart, she's getting a blood transfusion and lots of other extra tubes for pain and sleep drugs.
Ellie's chest being protected by Julia's baby doll.
The taping her face gives her some "model lips" - they are working on image for the babies up here so that's what we're going for here today.
Rest girl and heal up! We'll be taking you home back to Jacob, Xavier and Julia soon!
(Ellie also has her purple gem and putting contest pin right by her feet too.)