Pleasantly Surprised

Elli after surgery with her Silo, it's all wrapped up with gauze, but inside the plastic bag holds her stomach, small and large intestines and part of her spleen. The bag is sewn into her abdomen and when it is time, the surgeons will reduce or put the intestines back into her abdomen a little at a time. Elli doesn't seem to mind the new placement of her stomach, and actually her heart loves it!

Elli has been so stable it's almost scary. The doctors continue to be pleasantly surprised whenever they talk about Elli and how well she has done since her surgery. We have been holding our breath waiting for something to change...and well something did. Not major but Elli's chest tube has been putting out a little more drainage that it had been. 10ml/hr for the last 2 hours as of 10pm. Dr. H the on call doc for tonight thinks it might just be a positional thing because the nurses have Elli lying slightly to the left side, so it might have been a pocket of blood that is just now getting a chance to drain. Either way they are keeping a close eye on it and replacing the volume out with packed red blood cells.

In other news, the ECHO came back good, structurally Elli's heart is perfectly normal, other than it being slightly smaller that other babies her size. Dr. K said that now that we know it is structurally fine, it just has to prove that it can do the work it needs to do. And I guess we will be finding that out tomorrow. Yes that is right, Elli is going to start being weaned off ECMO TOMORROW!! Every morning they do an oxygen challenge on Elli and this morning she did awesome, her blood gases have looked great all day and they have the ECMO pump turned down to 300, and have had it there for most of the day and Elli hasn't been able to tell any difference. Her blood pressure continues to be stable and is a perfect 60/40 right now. The plan for tomorrow is to slowly turn down the ECMO machine while turning up the vent every hour and doing blood gases to ensure that Elli is tolerating it well. This was the plan this morning even before the chest tube started putting out a bit more than before. Dr. H said that if her chest tube starts to put out more blood volume than can be replaced (not the case now) than they will have to start the weaning process earlier and do it quicker. Dr. H also said that from how Elli has responded today and how well she did with her oxygen challenge, that she thinks that the weaning should go well tomorrow, but there is always the chance that Elli will have to go back on the "jet vent", nitric oxide, or other means to keep her airways open. We are still running the risk of pulmonary hypertension, which would be the reason to have the different vent. Hopefully everything will go smoothly and Elli will be able to tolerate being off ECMO with the conventional ventilator but we'll see tomorrow.

So tomorrow is going to be another HUGE step for Elli. Basically we are going to find out if her heart and lungs are able to support her, and we thought the surgery was scary! We will be posting more often tomorrow, I got a little lazy today considering it was so quiet down here in the ECMO room with no other babies around.

In other news, Brian and I did sneak away for a little while this afternoon and went and ate lunch at Famous Dave's and then went to Nebraska Furniture Mart. Since we are sort-of in the process of moving, we decided to get new living room furniture. We got a sectional, recliner, dishwasher and a stove. It was funny though, we spent a little while picking out the sectional and recliner, but by the time we made it to the appliances, we were ready to be done to get back to see Elli so we chose them in about 10 minutes. It's funny how much we miss her when we are away, and it was only for 3 hours! Either way we did the no financing for 30 months and all the items are going to be delivered to our new house the middle of September. It will be so nice to bring Elli home to a completely remodeled house with new furniture and appliances.

Mom's on Diaper Duty already. The nurse asked us both if we wanted to help change Elli's diaper, and Brian quickly said "I'll run the camera, you can do the diaper" Elli didn't mind a bit, but it was a little tricky with the silo, chest tube, abdominal tube, the cardiac lead wires and the temperature probe all to deal with, but I think it went pretty smooth.

In still other news, our first ECMO roommate Meghan, is doing very well, she has been extubated for a couple days now, has no more IV's and is drinking mamma's milk. She is doing so great and should be heading home relatively soon. Also, my friend Heather from St. Francis Hospital recently had her baby boy by c-section, he weighed over 9 pounds and was 23 inches long. So a big Congrats to the Archer family. And Brian just found out the the Koger family is back in the hospital with Wyatt, please keep their family in your thoughts and prayers as well, as he reherniated and had to have surgery this evening. He came out of the surgery with a super fancy patch (made of his other patches, Gortex, Alloderm and wire) and the plan is to extubate him tomorrow. There is a link from our page to his if you want to check up on him tomorrow. Well it's getting pretty late. Going to give Elli some kisses and then head back to RMH to try to get some sleep in anticipation for the weaning tomorrow. Thanks to all who have been so positive through our entire journey, the comments keep us positive as well. Thanks again! Brian, Cassi and Elli