Decisions, Decisions. . .

We took Lynnea to the U of M for her pre-op exam this morning. She, of course, hated this, and wonders why we torture her like this all too often. We spoke to Dr. St. Louis about how Lynnea is doing, and the surgical plan. He is incredibly pleased with how well she is doing at the moment...so much so that he's not really sure that now is the best time to operate on her, but he is leaving the final decision up to us. He would kind of like us to wait -- waiting would give her the chance to grow a little bit more, it would give us all a little bit more of that much needed time at home as a family, and there is a very small chance that waiting could eliminate the need for him to reconstruct her pulmonary vein. The echocardiogram that she had done on July 13th showed some improvement in the pulmonary vein compared to the echo that she had done right after her last surgery. Dr. St. Louis does not have any explanation for this improvement -- he says that the last surgery that he did (the aortapexy) may have helped a little bit, though he still isn't really convinced that it's the cause for this improvement, or perhaps it is improving on its own simply because she is growing, and as she grows the spot that is narrow is growing too so that it's not so narrow anymore. Unfortunately, since he doesn't know what caused the slight improvement that was seen, it's impossible for him to predict whether, or not, the improvement will continue, or whether it will ever improve enough so that it doesn't need to be reconstructed. If we would go ahead and have her surgery on Wednesday, he would do both a bi-directional Glenn and pulmonary vein reconstruction. The problem with doing the vein reconstruction is that, once you start messing with a vein, you're always going to have to keep working on that vein because scar tissue and other issues continually arise. So, doing this now would pretty much guarantee more surgeries in the future on the pulmonary vein. But, the advantages to going ahead with the surgery now rather than waiting are that she's healthy, and her heart function looks pretty good, neither or which are guaranteed if we wait. We are supposed to think about what we want to do over the weekend and call him on Monday to let him know what we've decided.