After Jacob was admitted to Duke, an emergency echocardiogram was performed. (Later, towards the end of Jacob's stay at Duke, the echo technician told us she remembered his admission and that they called her in an hour before her shift normally began to perform his echo.) The echo confirmed the Transposition diagnosis.
The "temporary fix" is to perform a balloon septostomy via a catheterization - they go up through a vein the groin and into the heart, where they place a hole between the atria of the heart to allow the non-oxygenated blood to mix with the oxygenated blood. As soon as the Transposition diagnosis was confirmed, Jacob was rushed to the cath lab. I believe it was around 7 a.m. by the time the ballon septostomy was completed. Here is Jacob after that procedure...
The balloon septostomy was successful. Jacob's oxygen saturation levels went from 55% to 98% almost instantly. Jeff called me after the procedure, and told me Jacob was doing a lot better and that they had taken pictures. I told him to hurry back with the camera so I could see them. My friend, Heather, took the camera and had all the pictures we had taken of Jacob so far printed and she put them into an album and brought it to me at Rex. There was a very noticeable improvement from seeing him in the special care nursery to after the catheterization.
In the meantime, the nurses at Rex were telling me I would be discharged that morning (of August 1) so that I could go be with Jacob. By the time my doctor rounded at 11:00 a.m., he basically suggested I stay put, having given birth less than 12 hours earlier. There was nothing I could do for Jacob except rest. Well, that, and I had starting pumping. Rex kept me overnight, and I was discharged on Wednesday, August 2.
Jeff and I drove straight to Duke to see Jacob. I remember being so excited to see him, and yet so scared about everything that was happening. He was sedated, and on a ventilator, but he was still with us!
In a wonderful twist of fate, his nurse the first two days was Mary Jo, who is a friend of friends, and I had met her before. We caught the doctors on rounds that Wednesday afternoon. They were hoping to do surgery on Jacob the following week. They explained he would need open heart surgery to fix the defect. Fortunately, there is only one surgery needed to "fix" most cases of Transposition - the Arterial Switch Operation. It restores the heart to as near as anatomically correct as possible, with just the risk of stenosis and scar tissue, which would be standard with any open heart procedure. The amazing thing is that the ASO has probably only been done for about 25 years. Prior to that, another surgery was performed - the Mustard or Senning procedure, and children could have serious heart problems as adolescents.
Jeff and I didn't want to go home without our baby. We live forty five minutes away, but that was too far for us. My dad made arrangements for us to stay at a nearby hotel for the first week. We were so grateful that we didn't have to worry about driving that far every day.
They left Jacob on the ventilator on August 2 and 3 because he had a brain MRI scheduled for August 3 and it was safer for him to remain on the ventilator during the MRI. While he was on the ventilator, we could not pick him up and hold him. When we arrived on the morning of Friday, August 4, Jacob was on nasal cannula and had the ventilator tube out of his mouth. Since he was finally off the ventilator, we could finally hold him!! Yes, this is the first time I had held him since he was born!!
On Friday, August 4, we also got the results of the brain MRI, and it was completely perfect!
On Saturday morning, we arrived at the hospital, checked in and went to the room he had been in the past few days, and there was no baby there! They had moved Jacob to a room with all babies - it is a NICU nursery with probably 8 NICU beds and 4 PICU beds. We had a lot of visitors on Saturday. I had many friends come by and Jeff's entire family, his mom's 6 brothers & sisters, some of their spouses & kids all came by and met Jacob. On Sunday, I spent lots of time holding and cuddling him! Sometimes, I even left Jeff, or one of our moms hold him!
No comments:
Post a Comment