Nick has a Surgery Date!

I can't really say today has been a long day, just full of information. Information on his heart that we didn't even know about or expect. I guess I will start with the morning and work my way up. Easier to remember everything that way.

We left the house around 10:00. Dropped the older kids clothes off at my parents since they would be spending the night there after school and taking the bus back to school from there, visited with them for awhile and then headed to Mt. Vernon to pick up our Sears pictures. They turned out pretty dark so remind me next time not to do a dark background. Other then that, they turned out great! The blue sure does POP right out in the pictures though.

I thought we would end up there a bit late but with Matt being a truck driver, he knew quick ways to get to Cardinal Glennon. Got to love truckers lol. We made it there with 15 minute early, checked Nick in and after waiting for about 10 minutes, they called us back. Nick weighed 15 lbs 5 oz just like he did last Friday but it was also on a different scale then any other times. His oxygen levels were 93 which Matt felt was way to high since they want them to be in the 80s.

Anyway, after waiting about a half hour, his surgeon came in and explained everything to us. I guess Nick has two holes in his heart instead of the one we always thought. He has the normal one that every baby is born with but normally closes after a month or two, and then he has the nickel size hole. They said if he didn't have the extra big hole that they would just keep an eye on the other one but since they will be in there to patch the big hole they are also going to patch that hole.

Ok... now I hope I can explain this all right. My lingo isn't all that great so I hope you guys understand what I'm saying. I was so thankful for his surgeon and his picture drawings because it made it so much easier to understand. Anyway... you know how one part of your heart has oxygen blood that flows to your lungs and then from your lungs it goes into the other side of your heart and then from there through out your body. Well he color coded the oxygen side with a blue pen and then the full body flow side in red. I guess that his body flow ventricle that should be attached to the red side of the heart is actually attached to the blue lung side of his heart thus bringing way to much blood flow to his lungs. What he plans on doing is taking advantage of Nicks hole and patching kind of like a tunnel to the ventricle that should be on the red side. With doing this, there is a chance that this patch might end up covering part of his blue side ventricle not giving much room for flow to the lungs. If this happens the hole that they have to cut into his heart, he will try to put a patch there and make a bigger space to allow for the flow needed to his lungs. If he is unable to do this then they are going to have to close up his lung side ventricle and put a tube (from a cows neck) in place higher up the lung side vertical, pretty much making a by pass to his upper lung ventricle. With doing this though, it is a given that Nick WILL have to have surgery in a couple years again to replace the tubing since he will be growing but the tube wont and then about every 5 to 7 years until he is an adult he will have to have surgery to replace this tube. He figures the surgery itself will last about 2 to 3 hours and that his heart will only be stopped for about 45 minutes to an hour max. He gave us all the things that could possibly happen but said that he does surgeries like this pretty often and that the children have done very well after.

Oh, I also forgot to add one more thing... The band that they put in back in October... what he plans on doing with that is cut out the section where the band was and sew the two ends together since the part that had the band I guess would stay small even with the band out. Need to update that in my blogs now that I think about it.

God... I hope I didn't loose you and that you got all this.

I asked him, since Nick has all this going on is he doing good and his surgeon said that he was doing great. He was watching him and was so surprised at how big he was and how well he was doing. He thinks very highly that Nick will be just fine after surgery.

So after the shock of hearing he has two holes instead of one and that there is a chance that he will have to have a tube in place of a ventricle that might cause more surgeries down the line... we were to pick a surgery date. His surgeon suggested waiting until sometime in April after the flu/cold season but understood totally our rush to have it done. He said that he was going on Vacation around March 16 and that it would be fine to have surgery any time after that. He said either March 25 or April 2 would work for him. Matt wanted a Thursday but we wanted the sooner of the dates so it looks like March 25 Nick will be having major open heart surgery. A day after my birthday!

So that's what went on. Matt and I made our phone calls to family and friends on the way home and talked about everything that was said in case on of us didn't understand something or whatever.