We're Officially Post-Fontan!!

Is it just me, or is it kind of an odd feeling to be on the far side of something that you've been building up to for months? I mean, obviously we're not done yet, but having miraculously made it the required six weeks without a cold, and now being done with the actual surgery...it almost feels like the hard part is done. Almost. We all know that that is absolutely not the case. But we're done with the original waiting game, at least. No, the hard part is now, helping a not-quite-two-year-old recover from a major surgery. But back to that in a minute.

Brandt's surgery was this morning at 8:30. He was on a fast all night/morning, but thankfully didn't realize it until right around the time anesthesia came to take him back to the OR. I wasn't able to go back with him this time, but they gave him some medication to keep him calm until they could give him the gas. Worked like a charm! His eyes were a little glazed over, but he didn't fuss at all!

After picking up our ICU pager, we met Shawna at the Ron-Don with Wade. She babysat him for the day, first overseeing him while he hung out at preschool, then taking him to the zoo with Allyson. By the time he got back, he was worn out to the point that he actually took a nap! (A rarity these days.)

Tanner and I grabbed breakfast, then headed back up to the hospital to wait in the parents' lounge. Usually, I'm a professional couch potato when the opportunity arises, but I have to admit that those four hours weren't fun. Eventually, we were paged back to talk to Dr. Chen, who was very pleased with how everything had gone. They were able to do everything the way he had wanted to, he'd taken care of the stent that was starting to become an issue, and Brandt was already being extubated! The latter, especially, was a big deal for us. The last time he woke up with a tube in his nose, he panicked, and the ensuing struggle wasn't pretty.

We didn't get back to see him for another hour and a half...the nurse told me later that it was a very busy time for them, getting him set up. His heart was throwing a little fit after coming off bypass, so they have him paced right now to get back into the sinus rhythm. We've been fiddling with pain meds all evening, because some make him woozy, some make him nauseous, some don't have horrible side effects, but aren't very effective themselves either...now that he's gone a while without having any bleeding, we're going to try a form of ibuprofen. As an anti-inflammatory, it should help a little more. Morphine is the pits, to be honest.

He's also been incredibly thirsty, which is expected. We gave him his sippy cup after the bunch of us came back from dinner, and that was a big hit. Until the morphine-nausea made him throw it all up. Moving him around to change his bedding isn't a big hit, either, because ouch.

The cool part about all of this, though? He's currently satting 94. Not even kidding. The first number is a 9, which we have literally never seen on him before. To be fair, he's still on oxygen, but this is still a big deal. Speaking of oxygen...

I guess I haven't really gone into the details of this surgery! The Fontan is basically completing what we started with the Glenn. Basically, we're taking the heart, which is normally a two-cycle-pump, and turning it into a one-cycle-pump. We'd already rerouted half the blue blood, leaving the other half to mix. Now we've finished rerouting all of the blue blood, and completed the cycle. Because the amount of mixing blood is minimal, now, his sats are automatically higher. However, there's a 90% chance we'll still go home on oxygen.

The main reason Brandt needed his Fontan this early was because of those pesky AVMs. They're little blood vessels that pull the blood away from the lungs before it can get oxygen, and that drops his sats pretty dramatically, at times. Those will start disappearing, now that he's getting enzymes from the liver to his lungs, but it takes time. While he's got the capacity to have higher sats, he's still got those little leeches keeping him low, so we'll have to wean over time. It'll probably be a few more months of oxygen, but at least the end is in sight.

So there's tonight's update...I'm off to go get a little sleep while I can. I have a feeling that tonight's not going to be the most restful one I've had lately, between the hospital couch and the cranky toddler.

Yay water! And our first glimpse of his eyes
this evening.

This doesn't seem to get easier to
look at.