Surgery Day +1

Dear all,

I really wanted to post last night because I know some of you may really want to know how little Isaac is doing after his surgery. But I fell asleep with my laptop on my chest while I was downloading Isaac's pictures.

Well, our little fighter was still doing pretty good last night. But I kind of had a bit of a panic attack earlier on in the day. I called the hospital at 11 am to find out how our little boy was doing but the nurse wouldn't tell me anything and asked me to call back at 2 pm when Dr. Ishii is in. That made me real nervous because I started thinking that something bad has happened to Isaac because the nurses usually don't want to talk to me when something bad happened and would want me to talk to the doctor instead (that was what happened when they discovered Isaac's reopened PDA). In any case, those 3 hours were tough to get through!

Well, I called back at 2 pm and talked to Dr. Ishii and learned that Isaac was basically fine. Dr. Ishii did mention 2 things - one was that the CO2 level in Isaac's blood was a little high. He thought this was because it will take a few days for his blood circulation to get back to normal as his blood circulation is kind of rerouting after his PDA was closed. So less blood is going into his oxygen. He didn't think it was a big problem and that things will improve in a few days. In the meantime, they increased the no. of cycles they ventilate air into Isaac to 45 times per minute. Isaac's CRP/infectious score was also a little high yesterday - at 3.8. But Dr. Ishii said this is typical post surgery and they will continue to give him antibiotics. I am hoping that Isaac's CRP score will decrease today.

Other than that, Isaac's blood pressure was good and he was able to digest all the milk being fed to him and he is back to getting 17 ml per feeding!

Isaac looked pretty good last night. He was sleeping well and looked comfortable. He even woke up for a little while and moved around quite a bit. His oxygen saturation level still goes down when he moves but we are really hoping that we will see a big improvement in that in a few days. He has to lie face up because he has 2 IVs in, one in each arm. In any case, we saw him trying to lift his butt a bit lying face up! Naughty boy because that definitely caused his oxygen saturation levels to crash a little bit. ^_^

Here are some pictures from last night. The big bandage on his side is where the incision was. Oh the white strip in the third pic is just a reflection from the fluorescent light off his incubator. I forgot to mention that they moved him back into his incubator from the open bed yesterday morning so we didn't get to take pictures of him close up.




Thanks again for all your prayers!

Sonia