Thursday Afternoon Update

One of the joys of open heart surgery in babies, and I guess for anyone but just knowing our context, is that no one follows an exact script.  They have an expected road but every baby tends to walk their own unique way.  As always David is doing things on his terms in his way and he has decided that it is going to be a little bit slower than people would like including mom and dad and his family!

The doctors really want to get him extubated (I'm sure I spelled this wrong but off the breathing machine is what I mean) as quickly as possible, in fact many times they do that before they leave the operating room.  David threw them a curveball with some wacky numbers and wanted to wait until this morning.  Well this morning he decided to throw them another fun number or two so they are now waiting until this afternoon as they try to balance his heart rate, body temperature, blood pressure, air flow, pulse ox, and cvp numbers.  The fun part is the medicines usually have a good effect on one and a negative on another so they have been playing the balancing game really well. It is absolutely amazing to see doctors and nurses at work, the people at Kosair's and I'm sure many other places do such a good job communicating to each other as well as to us what's going on.

David is also slowly starting to wake up so they are having to manage pain as much as they can as well as his anger at the breathing tube.  In fact as I type this Nicole had to jump up to keep him from trying to pull it our himself. We had to remind him that's what we are paying the nice doctor so much money to do (or at least our insurance is)

So we are kind of in a holding pattern right now, David has 3 chest tubes, a g tube that is draining stuff off his stomach. He's on a water pad that heats up or cools down according to what his body is doing. He has 13 different pumps to give him medicine and a whole lot of lines in case they have to push anything else. Hopefully by the end of the day we will have him awake a little bit more to breathe on his own and to cough and start getting that going as well as starting to get some of the fluid that they have pumped into him off of him.

Thank you all for your prayers and concerns.  We have felt all the love and we believe David has as well.  The next couple of days will be a little bit slower then yesterday was but that is a good thing. Just keep praying that he slowly gets better and we rest up some.  Thanks and God Bless

-Drew