Today I can literally account for every minute of the day. Peter had his open heart surgery this morning. The nurse told us the OR staff typically take patients between 6:30-7:30am. So we arrived on the later side around 7am. But when we got to the NICU they had already taken Peter to the OR. We ran to the surgical wing of the hospital( I reverted this later because I only gave birth a week ago I should not have run) to try and get to him to give him kisses of good luck, but the front desk took too long trying to find the extension of the OR. So many emotions ran through my body at that moment, Paul kept it together and we had our reverend with us to keep us calm, but at first I could not get over the lack of bedside manor the surgical team had, they strung us along for the past 48 hours not confirming Peter's surgery until 7 hours before the start time. And we had to beg to find that out. Well after calming down we walked over to the PICU to get a phone number to call in case no one notified us that Peters surgery was finished, we figured if they weren't going to let us know anything we needed to start micromanaging for updates. .
The nurse who was in the OR with Peter was actually very good at keeping us updated, she called when they began the operation, again when they finished, and last when he was being transported to the PICU. During all these phone calls we remained at home. Waiting at the hospital would have been torture. Plus I needed to stay in a pumping schedule and it's much more comfortable pumping at home, even though the hospital pumps are awesome.
We took our first trip to see Peter at 3pm. We got there and the PICU was not ready for us and said to wait in the lobby, we did for 45 min and then went back to see what the hold up was, well they tried to say we left the waiting room and no one saw us in there....lies we never left the room, no one looked inside the room all the way.
We finally got to see Peter after a long day of praying and waiting. He was sedated and even though the nurse prepared us for what we were going to see after the operation all the tubes, wires, and gauze was a frightening sight, not to mention that they also had to keep his chest open until the swelling goes down. The surgeon had to leave for some clinic hours but once he was finished he came back and explained everything that happened during the procedure. He said everything went as planned, but in the end they had some bleeding that would not clot so that took, some time to stop, but good news was he did not need a blood transfusion and operation was a success. His heart is beating on it's own, but his chest is still open because the heart was a bit swollen and they didn't want to close him until the swelling went down. The surgeon said He will most likely close it on Saturday for now it's important that he stays stable, so he is on a breathing machine, blood pressure medicine, and is sedated.
Tonight after Brandon went to bed we went back to the hospital to see our baby boy. He was still stable and his heart rate had dropped a bit and blood pressure rose from our previous visit which was good because they don't want a high heart rate and low blood pressure.
We kept our visit short with Peter because we were both exhausted, once we got home Paul and I fixed ourselves a well deserved drink. After the week we had I think we deserved a hour to unwind before bed. I'm hoping tonight we can sleep more soundly knowing Peters heart is fixed and we only have positive things to look forward to.
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