OHS #2

Stephen had his second open heart surgery early this morning. It was a success, according to our amazing surgeon. We are so glad that he is safe and has a healthy working heart.

This morning came much too soon for my liking. We were out of bed at 4:30am and headed to the hospital around 5am. We got him checked in and had some labs drawn and thought we would be waiting around for quite some time. But the anesthesiologist came and got him at 7:05 and off he went. It was nearly impossible to hand him over - I would have rather just tucked him under my shirt and run away from it all. But we knew what had to be done and somehow mustered the courage to put little buddy's life in their hands.

They told us the surgery would take about 3 hours and almost on the nose, the surgeon came and told us everything went well. They patched the rather large hole in his heart and put in a bovine's jugular (aka: cow's neck) valve to act as his pulmonary valve. The surgeon hopes that he will get a good 5 years out of it before it needs replacing. No more surgeries for 5 YEARS - you hear that Stevie??

We were expecting to see the little man by noon, but by 1:30 we still hadn't heard from anyone, so we started bugging the nurses and finally got to see him at 2pm. They are having a bit of a hard time getting him stable still. His blood pressure is high and he is bleeding a lot. It's not totally unexpected at this point in the game, since this was such a major surgery. They are working on giving him blood transfusions (glad we donated, all our blood types are the same), something to clot the blood, and other meds until the bleeding stops and they get the numbers where they want. Hubs and I are in the room with him now and I gotta say, it has been difficult seeing him like this again. Definitely doesn't get any easier. I feel kind of sick to my stomach and the tears come easily seeing him struggle even a little bit. They have his pain controlled, but it's just hard.


Our prayers started out as pleas for his surgery to be a success. They shifted to prayers of gratitude that he made it through. And now we are asking for a swift recovery. Thanks to everyone who joined us in thought and prayer today as we work through. Looking forward to being on the other side of this when it's all over.

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