May 21st is the big day!

Okay here is the down low. Dr. Fox thinks that Lucy is a terrific candidate for this type of surgery. She is the right age, weight and she is in good health. She does have a moderate VSD (which is causing most of the problems) and a small ASD. The patches will be gortex, which is kind of cool. She will go in early on May 21st, and the first thing they will do is to intubate her and put her under. Then they will start IVs. This could take a while because her veins probably have scar tissue from her time in the NICU. He is estimating an hour just to get the IVs started. The surgery itself should take 3 - 31/2 hours. Then she will come out and it will take 30 minutes to get her hooked up to the monitors and resting. When she comes out she will look something like this:
As you can see they will be monitoring everything in her body. There are some hurdles she has to pass before she can come home. 1) (#5) She has to get off the breathing tube and breath on her own. Sometimes this takes hours and sometimes it takes days. Dr. Fox estimates maybe a night. 2) (#3) She needs to maintain the rhythm of her heartbeat. She will have pacer wires to monitor her heart rhythm. These are threaded in and sutured into place. These will allow the doctors to control the rate & rhythm of her heartbeat. If she is not able to maintain her own rhythm then they will have to put in a pace maker. 3) (#13) The excess liquid in her chest needs to clear up. These are the chest tubes that will allow the blood and extra fluid to drain from her chest. When liquid stops coming out of these then there is no more excess fluid to pull out. 4) We need to know that she can contract her heart. She has extra blood in her heart right now b/c of the holes, and that makes it harder for her to contract her heart and get that blood out. Hopefully once they close up the holes there will be less blood for her heart to move around and it will be easier for the heart to contract. Those are the big ones. Otherwise we need her to eat and poop.
There are things that can go wrong, but you can use your imagination for all of those things. I don't want to get into all of the gory details. We are going to hope for the best...obviously. Dr. Fox does these types of repairs all of the time. I asked about him on our Down Syndrome board here and we got nothing but positive comments about him and his work. So there it is. Needless to say, we are scared out of our minds. We are trying to push those negative thoughts aside and stay positive. We want her better and we want to move on.
So that is it for now. We shouldn't have anything new up here for 2 weeks. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask them. Thanks for all the love and support. I will leave you with a picture of Lucy and Nurse Maggie...who is one cool nurse!