Margaret decided to be naughty during her heart cath today. 😒
Here's the lowdown...
The surgeon was able to re-balloon the left pulmonary artery to about 8.5mm to do a little touch-up. This is fantastic! This artery is beautiful and the blood flow looks great through that one. He didn't plan on doing anything to this side, but he felt it needed the touch-up and we are all happy that he did it. This artery should be good for quite a while.
When the surgeon went to work on the right pulmonary artery she started to bleed into her lung and they had to stop the procedure for a while. Naughty. There was an option of stopping at that point but they wanted to salvage the artery and did decide to attempt placing a stent after the bleeding seemed to cease around 30 minutes later. Thankfully, he was successful and placed a 4mm stent! He was hoping to place a larger one, BUT, this is a victory! We are extremely grateful that a stent was placed - it was very tricky and unfortunately there was a dangerous chance of that artery being lost which would have resulted in another open heart surgery very soon. That would have been VERY bad. Thank God we do not have to go through that yet! Kudos to Margaret's surgeon for working so hard on our precious girl's heart today.
The hope is that this stent will allow Margaret to avoid another heart cath for a few months, and more importantly avoid heart surgery for a while longer. An extremely optimistic goal would be for the next open heart surgery to fall around her 3rd birthday --- given her history and love for drama, we doubt she will let it gothat long, but we will pray and continue to listen to her body.
Now, what of the bleeding? There will be daily X-rays to monitor the blood in her lung and it should clear up. Right now, Margaret has earned herself a couple days on the CVICU floor. She will remain intubated and on sedation medications tonight -- totally sucks, BUT she's safe and will be able to be nice and calm through the rest of today and evening. Hopefully tomorrow she can be extubated but again, only time can tell. We have to listen to her body. We all know no one rushes anything when it comes to Mighty Margaret!
Moving forward, we will rely on a few different pieces of information to determine when her next procedure will need to take place: Echo, lung perfusion scan, sats --- Margaret will likely have sats that hang out in the 80s for her "normal".
Keep praying, friends. This is exactly why we didn't commit to any Thanksgiving plans this year. 😉
Approximate timeframe:
7:30am - Margaret goes back to the cath lab
8:10am - procedure actually starts
12pm - Cardiologist comes out to talk with us about what happened
...waiting to get to see her
Of course!! Doing our best to keep everyone in the loop. :) you can always text us, too we just might be slow to respond sometimes. :)
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