Back to Square One

Although the operation went well & so far it seems that her heart & circulation are better than they were, to look at her it just feels like we are back where we were after the first op & we've lost all that ground we had gained. Her chest is sitting open again & she's heavily sedated & paraylysed, she has 3 drains coming out of her & 3 different IV sites with six different infusions, plus she's still on dialysis. But so far she has been stable & we pray that this will continue.

So details of the operation...

Things went smoothly & as planned with no big surprises. She was stable under the whole procedure & as mentioned last night, although they had to take their time (hence the reason it took so long to get her back to the ward), she was able to come off the artifical heart pump & her own heart is coping well with doing the work all on it's own.

It was discovered when they came to reapir the valve that Hannah was actually born with a malformed tricuspid valve, so it is possible that it would have malfunctioned on it's own anyway despite the operation. They were able to repair it & although it is not completely sealing properly the leaking has been reduced considerably. I am still to find out if more will need to be done in the future or what.

As we had expected, when they came to join the Superior Vena Cava to the Pulmonary Artery they were still the size of a newborns & had therefore too high of a pressure in them, so a BT shunt was placed instead. This means that she will have to have another operation in 3-4mths time to do the original procedure of joining the Superior Vena Carva to the Pulmonary Artery.

Now begins the road to recovery again. Hopefully this time it will be less rocky, faster & not come to a halt. Thank you once again for all your prayers & words of encouragement.