Heart Cath completed

We're finished with the heart cath! The procedure went exactly as planned - we got to UNC early Tuesday morning (7:30am), checked in with Registration, went to the Cath Lab around 8:15am, the procedure began around 8:30am and ended at 11:00am. Ethan was under oral anesthesia and woke up pretty soon after the procedure was over. After the cath, Dr. Robinson (Ethan's cardiologist that we see every month) decided to go ahead and do Ethan's monthly echo. The advantage to doing it while we were in post-op is that they were able to give him a little more anesthesia (this time through his IV) to put him back to sleep for the echo. The sonographer said he felt spoiled getting to do the echo on a baby that's sleeping because he could get a good, clear picture without Ethan squirming around!

We are so thankful that the cath went well. Recovery did not go quite as smoothly though. After the cath, the nurses and Dr. Robinson had a hard time finding a good, strong pulse in Ethan's right leg (the one that had the cath) so by about 3:30pm, they decided to admit him just for the night for observation. They put him on a blood thinner to make sure he didn't have or get a clot and we just sat by his side the rest of the afternoon and evening, waiting for a bed. Finally around 8:30pm, a bed opened up on the CICC floor - it just happened to be the same room that we had last time we were here! I (Julie) ended up spending the night with Ethan and Dan came back home to get some sleep and take care of our dog.

Ethan's heart is looking good so we're still on track for surgery at the beginning of January. This is good news to hear that he's still a candidate but it's also kind of make us nervous that it's only a month away! Dr. Robinson said that Ethan hasn't outgrown his shunt yet, and he's gaining weight at a good rate so we're fortunate that this 2nd surgery is "elective" as far as the timing is concerned. This is ideally how it's supposed to be done. The surgeons prefer to have the flexibility to operate on heart babies at the parents' convenience instead of getting to a life-threatening time crunch - praise the Lord! We should hear back from UNC within the next week with the surgery date. And if that's not good for us, we can reschedule. We also have to make sure Ethan's not sick at the time of surgery, so if it get's to be about a week before surgery and we find that Ethan's got a cold or something like that, we still have the flexibility to reschedule!

Wednesday morning, Ethan's nurse found a pulse in his leg and Dr. Robinson confirmed it during morning rounds (about 8:30am) so he said we could be discharged. Well apparently, several patients on the floor were also being discharged because we were told we should be out no later than 11:30am but it took until nearly 2pm to get the discharge papers drawn up so we could leave! We were all exhausted when we got home and we all got a good night sleep (9 hours!) last night.