Surgery on Monday Morning

Corey and I just finished talking to Dr. St. Louis and signing the consent form for Lynnea to have surgery tomorrow morning at 7am. The plan for now is that Dr. St. Louis will take her to the OR and hopefully be able to make part of her aorta wider than it is right now. The part that he needs to work on is part of her native aorta, meaning that it is not the same part that he reconstructed during her last 2 surgeries. He says that it should not be too hard to get to the part he needs to work on, and that the risks involved in the procedure are relatively low (but again, it's still open-heart surgery, so it always carries some significant risks). He believes that the whole thing should take 4-5 hours. There is a 50% chance that he will have to leave her chest open for a few days after the surgery, but he is ideally hoping that he can close her up before she leaves the OR tomorrow. Like I said, this is the plan for the moment, but there are a few factors that could change this plan. The two main things that might change the plan are, if she runs a fever (other than the low-grade fever that she's been running for the past few days) between now and tomorrow morning, or if he opens her up and finds any sort of puss, he will not do the aorta reconstruction. In either case, he would still want to look around to see if he can find any source of infection in her chest cavity, and he would leave her chest open for a few days to keep an eye on things, and potentially let any infected fluid drain out, etc. So, whether he gets to do the aorta reconstruction, or not, tomorrow taking her to the OR should prove to be beneficial.