Success. . .Depending on Your Definition

Lynnea's surgery is complete. She's still alive, so from that perspective, the surgery was successful. Dr. St. Louis was able to open up the area of the aorta that was obstructed. Unfortunately, there were some complications. In all fairness, these complications were not entirely unexpected, but disheartening nonetheless. For this procedure, Lynnea had to be placed on the heart-lung bypass machine again, which we knew going into it. When they tried to take her off from the bypass machine, it became clear that her heart was not going to be able to handle the work of pumping blood to her entire body on its own. So, for now she is on an ECMO (Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation) machine. Essentially, this is a heart-lung bypass machine that can be used outside of the OR. Because of this, her chest will need to remain open. She will be on ECMO for up to 10 days to allow her heart to rest and hopefully heal, but we were told by Steve (Dr. St. Louis' nurse) that generally, if the heart isn't able to function on its own after 2-5 days, it most likely will never recover enough to pump effectively on its own.

Obviously, we still hope that Lynnea's heart will recover on its own, but if it doesn't we will have to look at other options, and it looks like there aren't many options left for her, other than a transplant. Some people have asked us why a transplant wasn't done right away when we found out the extent of her heart defect. We were told at the time, that trying to do a heart transplant in an infant isn't a good idea unless there aren't any other options -- this is mostly due to the difficulty of getting an infant heart, and the fact that transplanted hearts in infants tend to only last about 10 years, making another transplant inevitable before they reach adulthood. In Lynnea's case, getting a compatible heart for a transplant is further complicated by the fact that her blood type is O Negative, which is rare. Right now, we are happy that she is still alive, and we pray that she will still make a recovery one way or another.