Thursday- Waiting for surgery #2

Teag is hanging in there, being as tough as ever waiting for this afternoon's surgery. This will be her 10th heart surgery and 2nd in 24hrs... She had to go NPO this morning at 6am, but around 10 we found out that she wouldn't be taken down for surgery until 3pm so they let her have a few sips of 7up until 11am. She is sleeping now, but has struggled all morning with pain from surgery (which is treated with morphine bolusus) and being sick to her stomach from the meds they give her. She's taking Zofran and Ranitadine for her tummy but she still feels really really awful. We've been putting cool cloths on her and fanning her with a paper dotted with peppermint oil which seems to help the most. She also has some congestion in her throat from being intubated and she's having a really hard time trying to cough and feels like she's choking. :(

We had to tell her about today's surgery and she took the news pretty well. We focused on the bright spots like them taking out her central line in her neck (a major IV line that feeds almost all the way to her heart) while she's asleep. Normally she'd have to do this bedside while awake and its pretty painful. Her other IV in her arm has gone bad so they'll replace that during surgery too. Trent and I are pretty anxious about this procedure and met with the cath lab surgeon who will work on her today. He seemed very confident that he can enter in through her neck where her central line is and gently balloon open the bent stent. Best case scenario would be that he is able to enter that way, balloon it open and be done. He mentioned though that if it isn't responding to the balloon or if the stent has any cracks in it he may need to replace the stent by placing a new one over the old one. He also mentioned the possibility of having to access her heart through the artery in her groin which makes the procedure much more painful to recover from and requires yet another incision into her little body. Please pray with us that he's able to enter easily through her neck and balloon it open without complication! Here are a few pictures of the xray showing her stent before it was bent and how it currently looks. The bend doesn't look too significant on the xray but they are concerned enough about it obstructing blood flow that they want to fix it. Surgery is supposed to be around 3pm and I'm hoping Teag is able to rest until then.

 If you look closely at the xray below, you'll see a wire mesh stent hear the left of her sternum. This was before surgery when it was wide open.

 Here is the current xray from this morning. You can see the top right portion of the stent is slightly bent in. Again, it looks minor but this is the major artery allowing blood to drain from her upper body to her lungs so we need as much of a pathway as possible. You can also see the line going straight down into the top of the stent. This is that central line in her neck that will come out during the cath. She also now has wire twists holding her little sternum together. I'll update after surgery is complete.