Roadbump Number One

I'm completely exhausted right now (got less than 4 hours sleep last night), but didn't want to go to bed without posting an update. We finally got in to see Magnus around 3 p.m., and he looked much better than after his first surgery. He wasn't swollen at all, and his chest was closed. Of course, it was still definitely hard to see him completely sedated with tubes coming out of his chest.

The original plan was to try to wean him off the ventilator today, but as Magnus started coming out from the sedation and wiggling around, his chest tubes started collecting blood. Too much blood. The nurses tried to reassure me that it wasn't that big of a deal, but suddenly, the room started to fill up with people.

There's a scene in one of the Indiana Jones movies where the ophidophobic protagonist goes into some ancient temple or something and it's protected by hundreds of poisonous snakes. "Why'd it have to be snakes?" he says. And today I wondered, "why'd it have to be bleeding?" You may remember back in January, I posted about our fellow HLHS comrade Gabe, who passed away after developing bleeding problems following his stage 2 hybrid surgery. So even though everyone was trying to be reassuring, Gabe's story was looming large in my mind.

So, there were a few hours of excitement with trying to get the bleeding under control, which they eventually did, but because of that excitement, they decided to keep him sedated and paralyzed overnight to make sure he's fine and then take him off the ventilator tomorrow. It's not a huge setback, but it's not exactly where we wanted to be right now, either.

Our original plan had been for one or the other of us to stay with Magnus all the time throughout this hospital stay, but because he's going to be completely sedated, they encouraged us to just go home and get some sleep, and that's what we are doing.