Home Sweet Home

Lynnea was discharged again this morning. She was taken off from all oxygen support during the night last night, and has done OK breathing on her own. Her lungs still sound a little wheezy, a little crackly, and up until an hour ago (after we gave her a PRN dose of Lasix, an extra diuretic that we have around for special occasions) a little "wet." But these are all things that our home-care nurse and I feel OK dealing with, so the doctors were all OK with sending us home. Her blood-oxygen saturations have been good, and her heart rate is back down to normal. She's really grumpy -- my suspicion is that she's going through a bit of withdrawal after being on so many sedatives (24 hours of high doses of Fentanyl will do that to a person), so I won't be surprised if we have a rough night. Hopefully she'll be in a better mood tomorrow.

So, for the short-term, she's doing fine. This morning the cardiology team discussed her longer-term situation in their weekly conference. Essentially, they came to the consensus that she needs more surgery relatively soon, but they don't know exactly what or when. She is out growing her B-T shunt, which in turn, is limiting the amount of blood flow to her lungs. This is a bad thing. The options that they are considering are replacing her B-T shunt with a bigger one, or possibly doing half of the Glenn procedure (yeah, I didn't realize you could do have of that operation either). There was also much discussion about her aorta, and whether or not it deserves some attention right now; the debate is still raging. She has two or three areas that appear to be a bit narrow, but none of them are really bad enough to warrant more surgery right now; the fear is that the cumulative effect of them is enough to overwork her right ventricle, and thus would be worth trying to repair soon. When I asked what kind of time frame we are looking at for surgery, I was told 2-4 weeks, but realistically, we're probably looking at surgery in early December. I will give more details when I learn more.