Surgery: Days 1-3

Here are some pictures of me at Childrens Hospital over the last few days:

Friday AM in Cardiac Intensive Care Unit (CICU). Check out my sweet zipper, I bet you wish you had one too.

Thursday PM in the CICU with Mom comforting me.

More comforting from Mom in my big girl crib. I needed more comforting because getting off of the ventilator tube was very traumatic.

All together in the pre-op room before I headed off to surgery on Wednesday at 8AM.
The night before surgery. Here I am getting one of my sanitizing baths. This is my pre-zipper belly picture.

Hey all,

I'm still not that "with it" but I'll try to get you all up to speed on what's going on with me.

So things seems to be progressing nicely for me... when the Dr's and Nurses look me over, they usually smile at me - I'm not terribly impressed with them (considering the circumstances) - so I don't grace them with my illuminous smile.

Today, my goals are to get my drainage tubes taken out from my chest and to eat more of mom's breastmilk and to be able to have Mom and Dad hold me. They also want to try to get me off of the supplemental oxygen, but that may take a little while.

Thanks for keeping up on my progress and for continued prayers for a healthy and speedy recovery.

Surgery Day Complete

It was a successful day and we are very happy.

I'll start out this little message, but I'm not feeling up to too much activity tonight, so Mom will fill you in on the details for today:

Lydia has been such a trooper for the last two days of events revolving around surgery. Yesterday she had blood tests, an echocardiogram, an ECG and she was calm and alert during them all - even smiling during some of the stuff. Those tests/procedures from yesterday all proved that Lydia was healthy enough to undergo surgery today. That was a huge answer to our prayers and made all of ours and Lydia's hard work worthwile.

However, this also meant that today was, in fact, the big day!! It all started at 6AM when we had to be at the hospital. Grandmas and Grandpas and our associate pastor from Arvada Covenant Church were all in attendance before the surgery to send up some prayers before we handed Lydia over into the skilled hands of the OR staff. It was very hard, but we knew it was inevitable and that it was for the best.

After hours of updates from nurses inside the operating room, they were finally able to tell us that everything had gone well and surgery was a success at about 1:30PM. It took a few hours after the final stitches before we got a chance to see Lydia (they let us in at about 4:00). She looked so much better than we had expected - we prepared for the worst and were pleasantly surprised. However, we're not sure that we will subject you to those pictures... we'll start posting some of those as the days progress and Lydia becomes more responsive and as tubes and dressings are removed.

Although everything was satisfactory on the surgery end of things, we're still not totally in the clear. Lydia will be monitored closely for the next few days to make sure her little heart takes completely to the new set-up.

Your prayers and good thoughts were definitely felt yesterday and today but still welcome more for the days to come.

We'll keep you posted... but as for now, we're headed up to say good night to our little trooper.

Thanks again to all of you!