Last Night's Visit

Lee and I visited Graysen last night. He is doing very well, and remains stable. His heart rate and blood pressure are doing well. He is on several medications, including ones to help the heart squeeze and control blood pressure. Those are normal and give his heart some help while it recovers.

The only two concerns at this time are his bleeding and he has a fever. They are keeping a close eye on the bleeding since he bled in the OR more than expected. The fever is a result of going on the heart-lung bypass machine twice. Each time the child is put on it, it is stressful for the body. Going on it twice makes it more difficult on his body. As of last night, they gave him Tylenol for the fever, and were discussing putting him on steroids to help. We left before the fever went down and before they made the decision about steroids. Graysen did go into SVT rhythm in surgery two times. The first time, he came out of it on his own. The second time, they had to help him using electricity. The chances of SVT rhythm increase with a fever. Hopefully, we will go in this morning and his fever will be gone and his bleeding will be reduced.

He started to wiggle last night and was showing signs of coming out of anesthesia. It was good to see him move. They were not ready for him to wake up, so if he did, they would have sedated him. We are hoping that they will let him wake up today. There are three criteria that he has to meet before being allowed to wake up. First, he has to take spontaneous breaths on his own and the ventilator rate needs to be at 10. It was at 15 last night, which is making progress towards 10. He needs to complete a CPAP trial, which is where they let him breath on his own for 30 minutes with a respiratory therapist. The last criteria is that they would like to see his bleeding reduced from its current level.

Overall, he is doing wonderful! He is tolerating the surgery really well and we do not anticipate any roadblocks to his recovery. It was really neat to see him last night. He is pink now and looks a lot more like Caleb. He has Caleb's skin tone now, which is different to see. Before, Graysen had a dingy skin tone and felt clammy to the touch. Now he looks completely pink and feels normal. It is great to see him this way.

The stuffed animal in the picture is named Dots. Lee and I bought him for Graysen to comfort him during this surgery. So far, Graysen has received one stuffed animal per hospitalization. We almost missed getting him one for his July hospitalization, but thankfully the 3 AM visitor brought him Mystic.

Hopefully we will get to see him awake today.