Update 32

Well, so much for boring. When we got back to the hospital, we got an unpleasant surprise. We are off of boring and back on the roller coaster. Thaddeus has been intibated. In other words they had to insert a breathing tube. This is not the oxygen that he had before, this is a full blown breathing tube. This only happens in 10% to 20% of the cases. As far as we know this is not indicative of a problem with the surgery, it indicates that his body is having a harder time adjusting to the change in pressures than we had hopped. His blood pressure is also higher than they would like while his other stats are lower than they would like. The medicine they are using to lower the blood pressure is not doing so yet and keeping him sedated is not helping either. They seem confident that it is simply a matter of time before his body adjusts. In the meantime they are "tweak" things to try and make it as easy as possible for him. They gave him some morphine and are keeping him on a sedative for the night. We will check back in tomorrow when he should be allowed to start waking up, at least some. We don't know when he will be off the sedatives totally or when he will be able to eat from his bottle again or breathe without the tube, but they are optimistic that he should recover sooner rather than latter. On the plus side his bleeding is very much under control and you long time readers will be interested to know that his pee production is good.

On that note, good night all. 

32 B:

Little Change

Long time readers will recognize the phase 'slow but steady'. So far not a lot of change this morning, but there is some positive news. His blood pressure is back into the acceptable range. The next step they are looking at is to remove the heart line. When they do heart surgery they put in and leave in a line directly to the heart. This gives them access in  a worst case situation. They are planning on taking that out in the next few hours. It wasn't doing anything, but their willingness to take it out indicates that they are not very worried about his heart suddenly stopping. This doesn't mean he is out of the woods, but it does mean they don't think they need the deforesting machines to get him out of the woods, a chainsaw, axe and a hand saw will do.

32 C:

OK, we have a little more information. First of all, they expected Thaddeus to have high blood pressure right after surgery, in fact they would have been worried if he had not. Thanks to medication, his numbers are where they want them to be, and as he gets used to everything, they should be able to wean him off of the medication. As far as the breathing tube goes, they think they know why he needed it. It turns out that his left vocal chord (the one that had trouble after the last surgery) was severely swollen from having a breathing tube inserted and pulled out on Monday, and then having one inserted and pulled out again on Tuesday. It was so swollen that it was blocking the airway, so they had to put it back in again. He is now on steroids to help reduce the swelling, and he is sedated because lets face it, who wants to have a breathing tube in and be wide awake for it? So the plan right now is to simply let him rest for about 24 hours and let the steroids do their thing. Now when I say sedated, I don't mean totally out of it. He is still managing to wiggle around and suck on his nook like he can't wait for his next bottle, but he is not totally awake and crying either, so that is good. They are also able to control how much the breathing tube does or does not do, even to the point where he can control when it pumps. So when the swelling is down, they will dial down the breathing tube as well. If he deals with that well, they will take it back out again and see how he does. Then it will be a matter of just letting him take his time adjusting to having new internal plumbing.