Friday, Oct. 18th, 2013

Eli had a really good night last night surprisingly with very little fluctuations in his oxygen sats.  They increased the pressure/volume in his ventilator and that seemed to help.  His upper lobe of his lung popped out last night and he was able to get some good rest without nurses bugging him because his o2 sats were above 80 all night!  She said she even saw it at 95 at one point.  Then this morning his other side of his lung collapsed.  The cardiologist said a big reason this keeps happening is because of the ductus arteriosus that they have been keeping open with prostaglandins.  He said he felt when that is closed in surgery, that this will help the lung collapse issue.  They did some vibrations on his chest and back again to try to pop lung out.  There are so many people in the room and the worry is about his left side of lung and whether or not they should move on with surgery.  Right now they are moving all of his equipment over to transfer isolette and then we will be going to OR if they get the go ahead from surgeon.  Brian and I have a little anxiety right now remembering what his initial transfer was like.

7:37 AM
Surgeon just gave go-ahead.  It took lots of planning and preparation to get him in his transfer box.

8:06 AM

It was a very scary transfer with Eli's nitric gas flowing fast but he did awesome!  Scariest 5 min. ever, but we made it.  Then we had to kiss him goodbye.  They just took him back.  It's going to be a long day!

9:21 AM

Brian and I are anxiously waiting in the surgery waiting room.  A nurse will be updating us every hour.  She just came with her first update.  The first thing they did was sedate him through the venus line in his belly button (it may have been a combination of gas in his mouth/nose too).  Once sedated, they started working on getting an arterial line in his wrist.  They need to do another venus line and are having a little bit of trouble but working on it.

10:21 AM

Second venus line is in, they also opened his chest about 30 min. ago.  Now they are stitching in his chest tube.

12:14 PM

It took us awhile to get an update because last time the nurse came around I was in another room pumping and Brian was asleep and she didn't want to wake him up.  

Dr. Rodefeld said everything is going great, they are in the home stretch.  They have switched the pulmonary artery and aorta vessels and are now working on the tiny coronary arteries which is the most difficult part of the procedure. Dr. Rodefeld feels confident and said his anatomy thankfully is pretty straightforward (which I think means there were no kinks in coronary arteries which would make surgery more difficult).  This is the best news yet, because it was something we were so worried about!

12:42 PM

Keeping ourselves busy...We got Eli this giraffe because in the NICU all of his stuff (blankets, wall decorations, wing of NICU, etc.) were giraffes.

1:50 PM

Surgery is all done!  Dr. Rodefeld is very pleased with the results, they were even able to close his chest because there wasn't any swelling!  He said they are still going to keep him on nitric gas and everything he was on before because his pulmonary hypertension will take a couple of days to resolve.  He said all of his stats look great!  They are going to keep him pretty heavily sedated so he can rest and recover.  In about 3-4 days they will be able to take out his chest tube, and start weaning him off of everything connected to him.  Dr. Rodefeld said he benefited greatly from being a big baby...Glad my pregnancy woes weren't for nothing! lol  

He is in recovery room right now but we will see our little "Iron Man" soon!

4:50 PM

We finally got to see Eli!  It may look otherwise but Brian and I are marveling at how wonderful he looks, such a miracle!  His color is SO much better, the picture doesn't do it justice.  He's a little whitie like me now!  (the blue around his chest is just the sterile solution stuff they use before surgery.  They will keep this on because it continues to work after surgery killing off bacteria).  I rubbed his head and he just kind of softly turns it or licks his lips (before we could not touch him because it would aggravate him so much that his stats would go down and he would make this gut wrenching "screaming face" but no sound because he can't cry with ventilator).  This is the closest we've seen to a normal newborn and we are so so happy.  Even more impressive were his stats.  His oxygen saturation was 99%!  We are used to seeing his o2 sats CONSTANTLY going up and down (trending down) and loud beeping and alarms going off and constant care of nurses trying anything they could to get sats up again.  These pictures look intense but this room is so quiet, I cannot even begin to describe the overwhelming relief we have.  I know he's not "cured" but still!  Brian and I both cried and expressed our gratitude to Eli's surgeon, they really do perform miracles every day.

That little foot breaks my heart though for how many times he was poked. =(  He has an arterial line though so when they need to test his blood gases every couple of hours they can just draw blood from that now.