Cardiac Cath

Brynlyn's cardiac cath was Tuesday morning, 5-15-07 at St. Joseph's Hospital. Our check in was at 11:00 a.m.and the procedure was scheduled for 1:00 p.m. It's a very basic procedure and they were only looking for diagnostics, meaurements of blood flow, B/Tshunt performance, etc. We were able to walk her into the room and put her down on the table and hold her hand until the gas knocked her out, which took about 1 minute. Talk about your heart into your stomach when you leave your sleeping baby in that room. Now I completely understand why they don't allow parents into the OR.

So during the procedure (about 2-3 hours) we grabbed some lunch and thentracked down Becky Buendia who was also a patient at St. Joseph's. She wasin a horrible boating/tubing accident about 11 days ago. (Her story: She and her 2 friends flew off the tube and the one friend's head jammed into her stomach. 12 hours later she was in emergency surgery having 6 inchesof her intestines removed. She is doing much better these last 2 days and they are now waiting for her digestive tract to kick into gear and then she can go home. Becky, you're awesome--hang in there!)

So we got to spend this time with Sara and Becky, which was such a blessing because they are such a fun, wonderful family and it was good to see Becky doing well. After about 2 hours, they paged us and we went to the cardiac cath waiting room. Brynlyn was in recovery and coming out of anesthesia. We had a chance to sit down with the peds cardiologist, Dr. Graziano, and he gave us the report. The cath went very well. They usually go in through the groin vein to insert the wires to the heart. However, due to Brynlyn's many,many problems in the past and her previous 2 surgeries, there was way too much scar tissue to get the wires in. So they patched her up and came out of there (leaving a huge bruise there.) So they had to go through a vein in her neck to insert the wires to her heart. Her heart looks great and she has great flow through her pulmonary arteries to her lungs (which was what they fixed in her last surgery.) The B/T shunt is getting smaller and tighter and so she definitely has outgrown it and it needs to be removed and replaced with a conduit artery. So they have tentatively scheduled her for surgery on May 29th. This will be a full tetraology of fallot repair. Her case will be discussed at Cardiac Consult on May 22nd with all of the DR's and then we meet with the surgeons on May 25th and then go to the hospital for pre-op blood testing in prep for surgery. We do get to go home to enjoy the Memorial weekend. They anticipate she'll be in recovery 1-2 weeks postsurgery for recovery.

The main complication we had following the procedure is that the vein in her neck would not stop bleeding. The nurses paged the DR and he came in 3 different times to check it out. It was just a small, steady flow, but she was losing too much blood for a baby her size and so her oxygen sats would drop because she was getting weak and irritated from the constant changing of the gauze pads. She would completely soak a gauze pad with blood in about 45 minutes. So they admitted her into the PICU for observation overnight. Once she calmed down enough to sleep, then her sats started going up and the bleeding did finally stop. And she did not need a blood transfusion. They did need to insert an IV to draw blood in the middle of the night. Why they do these things at 4 a.m. is beyond me. But Brynlyn slept OK during the night and woke up looking and feeling better.

The surgeons came and did rounds this morning and they looked at a few of the pictures from the cath and thought her heart looked great and that she was a good candidate for surgery. She's healthy and strong so this really is a good time to go in. Besides, she's pretty blue and so Mike can then stop calling her his "Smurf baby." ha ha And we had many nurses coming in just to say "hi" to us. It was a mini-reunion. So atleast we know we'll be well taken care of when we go in for surgery in 2 weeks.