Down to the main hospital floor!

The "after" picture we have all been waiting for.  All pumps off, drain tubes gone, oxygen gone, only a few lines left in case we need to IV medicine or draw blood.  We are headed to the main hospital floor in a few minutes!

At last some progress.  When Megan and I arrived this morning we found the surgeons in an informal rounds with the doctor and nurses, and learned that her drain tubes had finally ceased draining.  Unknown if this just happened on its own or is due to her lack of fat intake yesterday (personally skeptical, since she hasn't really eaten anything for days), but who's counting?  They agreed to take the tubes out later in the morning.

Drain tubes gone!

She was fast asleep.  Turns out she woke up at 3AM last night and was pretty restless, so the nurses decided to give her a sleeping pill which really knocked her out.  With her in a sedated state already, they decided to take out the drain tubes immediately.  And they did!

Next up was her femoral arterial line.  That took a little longer as they wanted to test the remaining lines for blood draw.  She had this femoral art line, the triple femoral venous line, and the remaining IV in her foot.  The IV won't draw, but they are leaving it there for possible medicine delivery.  The middle line in the femoral vein wouldn't draw either, so they didn't even try the deep one, but the shallowest one did.  They will use this to take blood for labs as needed when she goes to the 2nd floor.  That established, they removed the femoral art line.

Dr. Van Burgen explained that the oxygen she has been receiving was meant to continue until the drain tubes were removed, as it is his pet theory that it helps (his words!).  Now that they are gone he reduced to 1Lpm and asked the nurse to remove it completely in an hour.

Trying to escape in my sleep

All of that got us excited this morning that we are nearing the end.  We tried to feed her some breakfast and all went well until the onslaught of meds by mouth.  Most of what she has been receiving by IV has been changed to oral or discontinued, which meant we had to somehow get her to take about five different things disguised as apple sauce, yogurt, and apple juice.  All went well until the laxative dose in apple juice, which caused a good portion of everything to come back up.  She wasn't happy about that at all.  She was allowed another 2 ounces of Pedialyte eventually to calm her down (we are now on a strict fluid restriction plan), and she eventually fell asleep again.

Early morning rounds - Dr. Ilbawi on the left, Dr. Van Burgen on the right

We had a meeting with a nutritionist this morning to go over her six week low fat diet (she can only have 2g per day), and her long term low vitamin K diet.  One of the drugs she will be on long term is Cumadin which interacts with vitamin K.  It gets a bit complicated.  She needs the Cumadin to thin her blood and avoid higher risks of blood clots due to her artificial blood vessel.  Vitamin K reduces its effectiveness, so they determine the dosage based on her "normal" intake of Vitamin K and blood labs which will be performed regularly (monthly?).  As long as we keep the intake consistent there should be no trouble.  In other words, if she likes to eat broccoli, she must eat the same amount daily!  That seems pretty unworkable to me.  Keeping track of the vitamin K content of everything she eats and managing it on a daily basis also seems unworkable.  We are still absorbing this information and will have to come up with a plan that doesn't completely restrict her diet unnecessarily.

Dr. Ilbawi's favorite patient

We are told the wagon will really be possible today, and Dr. Van Burgen is intent on getting her out and about, which will raise our spirits.  Being here so long is affecting all of us.  Yesterday I was personally in a horrible funk and am determined to be in a better mood today.  Seeing progress certainly helps.

[several hours go by - very busy day]

Almost 3PM and we have been cleared to go to the main hospital floor.  I very quickly uploaded the pics taken so far today and may have to arrange and caption them later.

Muriel's very special heart