Lynnea's 6th Heart Surgery

Tomorrow morning Lynnea will have her sixth heart surgery (assuming nothing changes between now and then...). Her surgery is scheduled for 7am, which means that we need to have her at the hospital by 5:30am. I talked to Dr. St. Louis a little bit when he called on Saturday about what he's planning on doing during this surgery; he was able to tell me about the things that he plans on doing for certain, and explained that there are some things that he won't decide on doing until he actually has a chance to see for himself what things look like in her heart right now.

Here is a diagram of Lynnea's current heart anatomy (or pretty close anyway). Red: Aorta (carries blood from her heart out to the rest of her body). Blue: Pulmonary Artery (carries blood from her heart to her lungs). Purple: B-T shunt (allows blood to flow from her aorta to her pulmonary artery). Green: Left Main stem Bronchus (carries air to her lungs). Orange: Left Pulmonary Vein (carries blood from her lungs to her heart).

During this procedure, Dr. St. Louis plans on taking out Lynnea's B-T shunt and replacing it with a bigger one because the one she has is too small to allow adequate blood flow to her lungs. He also plans on moving her pulmonary artery away from her left main stem bronchus to hopefully improve air flow through her bronchus into her left lung. There are a few spots on her aorta that might be narrow, that he may consider repairing while he's in there, but he won't know until he gets to look at it. He still feels that it is probably not as narrow as it appears to be on her echocardiograms, and believes that it is probably not something that he can do anything about at this time, but it never hurts to look.

I don't know exactly how long we should expect the surgery to take because a lot of it depends on whether or not Dr. St. Louis chooses to do any aortic arch reconstruction.