Day 5

This morning, Peyton went in for the cardiac catheterization. Everybody was running ahead of schedule, so they got off to a good start. Rayna and I went out to the PICU waiting room, and I gotta tell you, community ROCKS! Steve & Amy (my parents) got to the PICU before us. Barbara Conley was next on scene. Later we were joined by Don Ellsworth, Lyndsi Parker, Stephanie Perkins, Julie Thomas, & Linda. The time passed soooo quickly talking and laughing together. THANK YOU guys for coming!

Lyndsi and Don set up this blog for me while we were waiting, and there's no way I'd have taken the time to do so myself. This should make communicating easier. Feel free to pass this link to anyone and everyone. More prayer the better.

There's also a link on the top right to get any posts here email to you instead of checking back at the sight. You can also use an RSS feed, but you get to figure that out on your own.

The procedure ran a little long, and then the emotional roller coaster revved back up. The high of thinking that Peyton was gonna be fixed today fell through the floor with the cardiologist's report.

What was thought to be a 6 to 7 mm tube turned into much more. The entrance starts a 5mm, drops to 3mm, swells to 8mm, and terminates in a 10x10 hole. On the imaging, this tube was the size of her aorta (the main artery leaving the heart) and looked like intestine lining the side of her heart. (Read as FREAKIN' HUGE). The good news was that this extension of the coronary artery (the artery that feeds blood to the heart muscle) is not actually involved with feeding the heart, so all the doctors need to do is shut it down.

Sounds easy enough, right? Well the catheter couldn't get large enough plugs into the tube's inlet and outlet holes, and the pressure on a potential plug at the smallest diameter was too high to secure a plug.

So we go to option number 2: open-heart surgery.

This rocked Rayna pretty hard, but for some reason, I had expected to go this route from the beginning. Rayna's grieving the hard road ahead of Peyton, the recovery process, and the letdown of not having the problem solved.

Now we sit here in the PICU with our baby girl intubated (breathing through a tube), thinking "Ok Lord, we'll keep walking this road one step a time with as much trust, fidelity, and obedience that the Spirit can muster in us."

Going forward, the Austin-area cardiologists and cardio-thoracic surgeons will review this case tomorrow morning, and our cardiologist will come back to us with a plan from the surgeon. We anticipate surgery on Monday or Tuesday of next week.

One of the cool things about youngsters is that they heal quickly. Rayna and I were expecting a recovery time of 4 to 6 weeks with lots of pain after an open-heart surgery. We've been told now that it could be as little as a week with relatively little pain. Unbelievable.

Thanks for the prayers, and thanks to Eddie & Lou Ann, Julie, and Barbara for the meals today!

PS: To send a get well card, check out: http://www.dellchildrens.net/patient_get_well_cards