Surgery - part two

First, thank you so much to the many of you who have sent prayers, love, and offers of help through email, text, blog and facebook. Wow. Second, Lesley... AS IF I would go to the hospital without the prayer beads you made me. :) I have worn them the whole time - as I do nearly daily under regular circumstances. They bring me comfort and I am always so thankful to carry with me some of your special brand of juju. I love them/you.

I was still pretty zen when I wrote that earlier update. By about 3:00, my zen-ness was starting to expire. I was antsy, did some pacing, thought any minute they would wheel my baby through the door. I did an excited half-lunge anytime someone walked a little too close to our room. By about 4:30 I could feel a voice rising in the back of my throat that said, "I WANT MY BABY" and it sounded a little like something out of The Exorcist. 

We got a couple more updates from the OR and they were reassuring. Finally, Dr. Brindle came to see us. She was smiling big and super excited about how well Samuel had done. She made us one of her famous drawings on paper towel to explain what she'd just done to our baby's innards.

Sam had a reasonably small hole in his surg-assist (pig intestine) patch and there was a bit of bowel and stomach that had made its way through the hole. She did a double patch on the hole with surg-assist on one side and goretex on the other. This way, as Samuel grows and things stretch or slip, one patch can fill in where the other might not.

There were no outward respiratory symptoms of his reherniation; we didn't notice changes in his respiratory rate or colour or profusion. Signals were his decrease in feeds, an unusual flavour of fussiness, and his great big vomit session. It appears that his lungs were unscathed by their latest bowel encounter and his heart held up fine also. It was a good reminder that reherniation doesn't always show up in an obvious way and Chris and I are glad that we listened to our instincts.

Samuel is growing muscle tissue where his left diaphragm was missing. This is remarkable and fantastic news. While it is common for some kind of scar or fibrous tissue to grow in where the diaphragm should be, it is less common that functional diaphragm muscle grows there. Our fabulous nurse Kat compared Sam to a frog that regenerates severed limbs. Heehee. Really though, this would mean good news for his breathing capacity in the long term and may also decrease the chances of future reherniation. I don't think that Sam will ever top the Secret Lung trick he pulled for his first surgery, but Secret Diaphragm is certainly an excellent encore performance.

Samuel was intubated for surgery and we were told to expect that he could remain intubated for a couple of days while he recovered. However, he did so well that he was extubated before he left the OR. He came back to us with NO breathing tube - just some oxygen via nasal cannula as before. He is a bit tubed up in other ways - an NG to drain stomach contents, a chest tube to drain fluid around the surgical site, a Foley catheter, and the old familiar leads on his chest to monitor respiration rate and oxygen saturation. He has an IV to give fluids and an epidural to offer pain relief. These things will fade away as he recovers over the next couple of days.

Chris and I were both able to hold and snuggle our Sam as soon as he was settled back into ICU after surgery. He was gone nine hours - the longest that I have been away from him in the three months he's been home from hospital! We went home to put the big boys to bed and toss in some laundry, then I came back to be with Samuel. He is resting peacefully now, although he has woken up a couple of times and expressed intense displeasure at having an empty belly. Hopefully, we'll be able to start feeding him slowly tomorrow because being hungry is *not* working for this baby.

As soon as we knew from Dr. Brindle that the surgery had been so successful, I became a bit ridiculous. I teared up at witnessing her genuine excitement over his progress. I teared up telling the respiratory therapists here in ICU that he was coming back without an endotracheal tube. I teared up when the cafeteria lady asked us how our son was doing. It's embarrassing. But my awe and gratitude... well... there are no words.

I'd prepared myself for him to be pretty beat up by this whole thing today. Granted, there are some new scars for the surgical incision and chest tube drain and there are a whole lot of poke marks where they tried (unsuccessfully) for arterial and central lines. But mostly all I could think of when I saw my Sam's sweet face after those nine hours was... he's so beautiful.

Our recovering super-babe.