Recovery: The Beginning

We're back in the room. Silje has been settled into place. It's still a pretty amazing scene, however. There are even more tubes, wires and electronic gizmos attached to this little girl. She's on the breathing machine (for the next day or so), on a pace maker (for the next few days or so) and they have her pretty heavily sedated so that she doesn't wake up too much.



Pace maker: apparently, as it has been explained to me just moments ago, the beat of the heart begins in the right atrium at the top of the heart, causing it to contract, moves along the side of the heart down to some specialized cells on the ventricle, causing it to contract. Silje's heart is initiating that beat, at the top of the heart, but after surgery, there is some swelling which causes an interruption of the electrical flow to the ventricle. That's where the pace maker comes in. It sees that the atrium has started a beat, and tells the ventricle to go ahead and beat, even though the ventricle didn't hear if from the atrium. So, Silje's heart is actually pacing itself, but the two parts need some help communicating. ...or so I understand it!

Dr. Abraham stopped by to give us the update on how surgery went. He said that everything went as planned, everything went well and Silje tolerated it all really well. He explained the part about the swelling, but Abarbedell explained about the flow of electricity. (The things we would all know had we been paying closer attention in whatever class that was.)

Jeni and I were allowed in to see her first, then Jeni's parents were allowed in.



Dr. P was just in to do a follow-up echo cardiogram (I didn't catch his full name all that well), and everything is looking like it should--blood flowing where it is supposed to be, and not flowing where it shouldn't. He was very indulgent to a curious daddy asking questions over his shoulder. He could see the valves in the heart clearly, but with all the bandaging, he only got a "high up" view of the aortic arch. It seemed to be all connected, though, and that's what this was all about.



Now we wait again and watch her progress through the night and into tomorrow and the next days.

We have really appreciated the thoughts and words of so many people. It may have seemed like I should have been focusing on my daughter more during this surgery, but I have to say that there wasn't much else going on in the waiting room this morning. So, it was a nice disctraction to have people commenting and passing along their well wishes.

Let's see what tomorrow brings, ...now that there is a tomorrow.