It has been six days since Faith’s last surgery. Her heart appears to be doing well, but her lungs are still very sick. She has developed the same bacteria’s in her trachea that were there before the last surgery. The doctors have been working aggressively to treat it, but that has required a substantial amount of fluids.
This has made it difficult to heal the other damages to her lungs. In order to help with some lung recovery, her chest has been left open, and she has a patch holding it together. The idea is to allow her heart and lungs more room to work under less stress.
Some good news is that the secretions in her lungs that were once bloody have been clearing up. Unfortunately at this point, there are so many other things going on. It is like a vicious circle. Read more…
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Today Faith is going in for another surgery. Her mitral valve has some severe leakage, which the doctors believe to be the biggest cause Faith’s current condition. The surgeon is going to go back in, and either try further repairs or replace the valve all together. The replacement valve will be made of pyrolitic carbon, and it will be 15mm or 17mm in size. The 15mm valve is a custom valve that is made specifically for this operation.
This surgery, however, does not come without significant risk. At this point Faith’s lungs are very sick. They have not been able to significantly recover from her previous surgery because of leakage in the mitral valve. Read more…
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The surgery went well considering all that was done. They did fix the coarctation as well as the AV canal defect. The operation lasted about 7 hours, and it was about 12 hours until we were able to see Faith again. It basically all went according to the plan that was laid out in the previous post. There were a couple of things that the found once they started the operation that needed to be fixed. The first was that the right ventricle walls were not relaxing open the way that it should. Some of the bundles of muscle tissue had connected both the posterior (back) and anterior (front) walls. The surgeon cut the bundles allowing the right ventricle to open fully. This wasn’t a big deal for the surgeon when he saw it.
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We received a call yesterday from the surgeons office. They need to move Faith’s surgery to September 3rd. We will keep you all posted as we get closer to Faith’s surgery and recovery.
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