After the Heart Catherization

Lynnea is recovering nicely after her heart catherization. She will spend the night in the PICU, and will possibly go home tomorrow. Unfortunately, even though performing the heart catherization allowed the cardiologists to see what is wrong, they were unable to fix the problem with this procedure. The stent that Dr. Gruenstein placed in Lynnea's PDA during her first heart surgery is partially blocked; essentially, her PDA is trying to close itself. This is not a good thing -- she needs that ductus to remain open in order for her to survive. In order to correct this problem, she will need to move on and have the second stage open-heart surgery very soon -- sometime within the next two weeks. Her team of cardiologists will discuss the situation in the morning and decide whether she is big enough, and strong enough to handle both the reconstruction of her heart that they need to do, and the re-routing of blood flow from the upper half of her body directly to her lungs at this time, or if perhaps she would be better off if they did the reconstruction now, and waited and did the re-routing of blood flow later in a separate procedure. We should have a better idea of what they are planning on doing after we talk to them sometime tomorrow morning.