Finally...an update

When we arrived at U of M early Monday morning I was sure that I'd be able to give daily updates of Kai's progress. I figured that there would be a lot of "down time" and waiting that blogging would be no problem at all. It turns out that 2 year olds and open heart surgery are pretty busy and time consuming!

As many of you are already aware, Kai came out of surgery and into the PTCU (Pediatric Thoracic Cardiac Unit---the cardiac ICU) Monday night. All things considered, he did really well. The surgery appears to be successful---that blood is now able to get to the lung and become oxygenated! With missing anatomy and valves on the right side of his heart, this was a struggle before; so we're so thankful to see oxygen saturation levels that are no longer in the 70s!

Yesterday afternoon those oxygen levels began to drop. We had a small emergency---and found out that the doctors and nurses here can move very fast! Of course, as soon as I posted on Facebook that he was stable and his levels were coming back up where the doctors were comfortable with, they began to drop again. The surgeon came in a few minutes ago and said that this is something we'll be keeping a close eye on today. Another thing that we're watching closely are fluid levels. Kai has quite a bit of fluid around his heart and lung. He has almost 5 pounds of extra fluid in his little body right now. This is diminishing his lung function right now.  It also sounds like the catheter that he had taken out yesterday will be going back in sometime this morning. I have a feeling that he is not going to be happy about that! Actually, he hasn't been happy about anything lately. I can't really say I blame him, but last night was ROUGH ---a lot of screaming, thrashing around, etc. He definitely has a lot of "fight" in that little body!

I will do my best to give an update later today or tomorrow morning! Thanks for all of the prayers, emails, messages, etc! We definitely appreciate all of the support that Kai and our family has!