Thoughts At The Bedside

1.55pm

We've been at Abi's bed for the past couple hours. She wakes up very often, keeps her eyes open and looks at us. Then she's getting impatient and looks like she would like to say something; her eyes are unbelievable; they speak for her.

Due to her airways being swallen they had to postpone extubating her until this evening. She's on Decadrone, a steroid that will get the swelling healed. They will check again and if everything goes well she will be extubated tonight. If there are no stepbakcs we will try feeding her a bottle about 6-8 hours after taking her off of the ventilator. If she takes the bottle and tolerates the food they won't put the feeding tube in!!!! This would be great since this will be one of the things keeping us in the hospital once she's out of the CICU (Cardiac Intensive Care Unit).

The next steps will be to remove the central line that is in her neck, removing the access line that is going from her tummy to the inside of her left atrium and pulling out the last chest tube that is draining the fluids from the heart area out.

If this goes fine and there are no stepbacks she should go to the stepdown unit and being there is mostly for the parents to learn carding for a child after open heart surgery. Since there are 2 classes we will need to take we are planning on starting as soon as possible, so on Monday morning we will take the 'how to care for a child after heart surgery' class and in the afternoon the CPR class. We have taken this one after Abi was born but we will take it again.

So we may be done with the classes before she settles down in the Step Down unit.

I just talked to the nurse and, she didn't want me to get too excited so she unwillingly said yes, but she did say yes when I said there was a very realistic chance we would be home next weekend!!! This would be best best case scenario, but we saw a couple of those this past week, didn't we! ;-)