Home, James

We came home from the hospital early yesterday afternoon.  Saturday had been a pretty good day for Z, with the move to the non-ICU, taking several good long walks (apparently important for his recovery), and finally starting to show some interest in food again (even if I had to trick him into eating by making his chicken cluck at him).  The downside of the new room, of course, was that he was no longer on his own...we were sharing a semi-private room with a 9 month old little boy.  The baby himself was not really a problem, but the family was!  They had a lot of drama related to why the baby was in the hospital, and it caused a fair amount of disturbance, what with all the various people coming in to talk about it, and the family getting upset and all.  Luckily we were there for less than 24 hours.  Sunday morning they did a last echo to make sure things were still good (they were!) and the last two monitors were removed.  While we waited for Daddy to check out of the Ronald McDonald house and come to pick us up, we took a couple more walks to the play room and the room where the bunny was (unfortunately the bunny was inaccessible on a Sunday, but we could look at it through the window). Then we waved goodbye to our nurse, loaded up in the car, and headed out.  Z slept the whole way home, and we were greeted by a very excited, very bubbly, very raspberry-y baby when we arrived.  And a very clean house, courtesy of Grammy, thank you so very much!  :)

Less intense

We're out of the pediatric ICU finally!  This morning they took out his chest tube and central line, and the IV in his foot went bad this afternoon and was removed as useless, so he no longer has anything sticking in him.  He's been pretty chipper all day, despite not getting much sleep last night.  We took two good long walks around the PICU this morning, but we haven't explored the regular children's ward yet.  There's apparently a bunny, though...

Take heart

The surgery went fine yesterday.  They had given us a laundry list of things that they MIGHT have to do, depending on what they found when they got in there.  The minimum they expected to have to do was remove the band on the pulmonary artery, remove any scar tissue that had formed around it, and make sure that the artery didn't need any repair from that removal.  The other "mights" included putting another occlusion device over the VSD, attempting to sew a patch over the VSD, and performing major reconstruction of that artery - and that reconstruction would have involved putting him on bypass and stopping his heart.  Needless to say, we REALLY didn't want that to happen. We were lucky enough that everything went smoothly...they got the band removed with minimal artery repair needed, and decided after watching the newly-unimpeded flow that there were not any VSD holes significant enough to warrant further surgical intervention.  The surgeon explained to us that yes, there is still a small amount of pressure imbalance, but if Z was a brand-new patient presenting with this amount of imbalance they would not be willing to surgically repair it.  The likelihood of it being a problem is extremely small.  So while future surgery seems very unlikely at this point, it can't be guaranteed...but at least we no longer have a band needing removal looming over us.

The Z story

Z had a pretty rough first year of life.  Always a small baby, we discovered when he was just shy of 3 months old that he had a heart defect preventing him from thriving.  The story is long and involved, but since we're about to pick up where it left off, I thought I'd share the back story so that future updates would make sense.