Deja Vu

So I find myself sitting in the waiting room again on the 7th floor of Baylor with Rebecca. I'll get to why in a sec. Its Monday around 5:30 and we've been here about 3 hours. The chairs are not super comfortable and its a little awkward sitting with other families staring at a tv program that maybe no one in the room wants to watch, but everyone is too polite to assert themselves. Except the Hispanic couple that was watching the Spanish language soap opera when we got in there. I have no idea what was going on, but they are very passionate and emotional. I hope everything turns out ok.

So we got a call this morning that they might try to operate based on the xrays they took. Thomas had an obstruction in his bowel that they wanted to address, and since they were in there, they would go ahead and clamp the PDA in his chest. The surgeon hadn't looked at anything, so we were kind of on a wait-and-see mode. At 2:15, they called and said they were ready, and when I mean ready, they wanted to know how quickly we could get to the hospital without breaking any laws. So I grabbed my sandwich that I had just made and we broke some laws (sorry).

When we got there, we met with the surgeon who gave us a very quick overview of what he saw on the x rays and he planned to do, and then just as we were able to inhale, the anesthesiologist gave us an overview of what he would do and how it would affect Thomas. It was very overwhelming and very much like the end of a drug commercial on tv. These are all of the really terrible things that could possibly happen, God forbid, if we do what we just described and please sign here giving us permission to take that chance.

None of the procedures they wanted to perform were a surprise, but when you hear a doctor describe just how risky it is and point to the end of a pen to describe the artery that he has to go after as being that small, and we'll need to collapse the lung to get to the artery that needs to be clamped, and of course he has no immune system to speak of, it really throws you.

Just to summarize, they were going in at 3 different points: The neck to get to the carotid artery to run a catheter into the heart (this will be the feeding tube for a while). The abdomen to remove the obstruction in the bowel. The chest under his arm to perform the PDA.

Everything turned out ok. The doctor felt we were fortunate to go in when we did. There were some perforations and underdevelopment in the lower part of the bowel, so he exposed the bowel temporarily to provide relief and time to heal to the lower part. The other 2 procedures went very well. He was confident that Thomas would get over this hurdle and be stronger for the next.

Now Thomas will have 3 scars, so that knife fight I had mentioned before was against 5 guys.