Broken heart fixed!

Cadence's heart repair is done!  Yippee! Yay! Hooray!  We were told to be there at 8:30am for a 9:30am start.  She went back at 2:30pm!  That is a VERY late start for a hungry toddler, but she took it like a champ.  Just when she reached her breaking point the anesthesiologist came back and gave her some oral versed.  I love that man!  She was a happy, silly girl after that.  The procedure was fairly quick and the cardiologist reported back to us by 4pm that she was finished and we would see her in the recovery room in a few minutes.  He said that everything went great!

Cadence woke up pretty easily and her biggest challenge for the next few hours was trying to fill her hunger void while lying flat (to protect the catheter sites from bleeding).  The hospital is expanding and we were able to get onto the new pediatric wing.  It was GORGEOUS!  Huge room, floor to ceiling windows with mountain views, wall mounted TV.... I was waiting for them to come turn down our bed and leave a mint on the pillow!  Best of all, though, (from a nurse's perspective at least) was how clean it was.  Loved it!  Cadence and I slept pretty well in her little bed and Brad stopped by in the morning with a snack before he went to work.  There was a follow-up ECHO (ultrasound of her heart) in the morning and the technologist was impressed by the size of her ASD closure device.  She said it was almost the size of the whole atrial septum.  We were also told that her right heart enlargement had already improved in just the 16 hours since the device had been placed!  Wow!  We had discharge papers by 9am but had to wait for her to get an EKG.  Just went I talked a co-worker into doing it the person who should have done it earlier showed up!  We were out by 11am.

I am so glad to have it done!  Things could not have gone more smoothly.  I can handle delays, but the fact that there was no life threatening complication... I consider that a win!  I am grateful that we have a hospital so close to us where we can get this done.  Pediatric interventional cardiologists aren't easy to find (especially ones as good as this one!) I am so thankful to so many people for their kind words, reassurances, prayers, and underwear dances!  You all are the best!

She was really hungry!

Managed to put away some fries

Room with a view

Cadence's cath tomorrow

Last summer I was stunned when we learned that Cadence had an ASD (a hole in heart). We waited a year to see if it would close on it's own.  This summer, as I suspected, there was no change.  Thankfully (very thankfully!) it can be closed in the cath lab.  This means that instead of open heart surgery, they will go into a major vessel in her groin and guide a device up into her heart.  They put the device through the hole in her heart and then it opens up like an umbrella and closes the hole.  Sounds simple, right?  Of course,  knowing what I know can be hard.  The one in a million, freakishly gone wrong, "wow, we've never seen that happen" type of things that I see in my daily job.  It is these images that would take my breath away when I have thought about this procedure for the past year. 

When people would ask about it I would say I was nervous but "it will be fine".  This is my standard answer when I am trying to convince myself that things will work out but in the back of my mind worry that my world might come crashing down.  Dramatic?  Yes.  But I can't help it.  For some reason, though, I have felt a great sense of peace this past week when thinking about Cadence's cath.  I say "It will be fine" and actually believe those words.  I'm more focused on the challenge of forcing  convincing her to lie flat for six hours after the procedure (due to the large catheter that they put in her vein) than the "what if's" that usually creep into my thoughts.  I feel thankful for that feeling and for the fact that this can indeed be done without open heart surgery.  That said, I would welcome prayers, chants, incense burning, dancing in your living room with underwear on your head, or whatever you do that can send some good vibes Cadence's way. Thank you!