CICU, Day 1

I am writing this at 11 pm while sitting in the CICU, so please forgive me if things are either incoherent or sappy as I am both wired and exhaused.

We made it through surgery!!  I can't even begin to tell you how relieved we were when we got the call that he was all done and that things went really well.  He had a few tough moments coming off of bypass, but he kicked it into gear and sailed on through.  They found that the two holes were each about 1 cm across, which to me seems huge compared to the size of his heart.  Closing them up should do quite a bit to increase the efficiency of his heart and he should start growing like a weed!

It seemed like such a long wait until we could see him again, but it was such a relief to see my baby!  We were quite afraid of what he would look like immediately after surgery, but you know it wasn't too bad!  He looked like sleeping Logan.  He was a little puffy, and the ventilator didn't look great, but he looked like Logan.  Nothing much happened the rest of that day.  We sat and watched and made sure he was stable.  Boring is good.

Today was a big step forward.  After all of the watching and weaning him off of things they started to let him wake up and took out the ventillator.  The vent wasn't breathing for him, it was just helping him and taking some stress off of him.  They got it out and he continued to do fabulous.  They were able to wean him off of most of his medications which was great.  It took a good portion of the day to get them out of his system, but hour by hour we saw more and more of our son return.  Even while sedated he was kicking his legs around like usual.  It absolutely broke my heart though the first time he opened his eyes and really took a good look at me.  A real focus and a small twich of his face that said, "MOM!"

It was so fabulous just to look at him, even if I couldn't hold him.  We could hold his hand and stroke his head, which is more than enough.

He did have some struggles through the day.  He seems to be quite congested.  We think it is his body reacting to being off a lot of the medications and he just needs to get everything out and equillabrate a bit.  He is also having a hard time coughing to get things out though which is making him really mad.  He's mad so he cries, but his throat hurts so when he cries he gets even more upset.  It's a vicious cycle so we are doing our best to keep him calm. 

 I can't tell you how much it kills me to see him clearly in pain and not being able to do more than stroke his head.  He's tired and I just know that if I could pick him up I could hold him just where he wants to be and bounce him right off to sleep, but the poor kid can't move.  He's got one arm taped down to a board to hold all of his lines in place, he has a tube down his nose, a wire coming out of his neck.  I'd be sad too.  

So that's been tough, but hopefully if he can keep his blood pressures under control tonight, some of that stuff can start coming out tomorrow and we can hold him again.  He needs some good mama snuggles.  

So we wait and watch some more tomorrow.  They did tell us that the CICU is completely full and if one more case comes in Logan will actually be bumped to a step down unit since he is the healthiest of the bunch.  Crazy hey?  It really makes you appreciate how healthy he actually is.  It also makes your heart break for the other 11 families on the floor.

So that's it for now, we wait and watch.  Everyone is really pleased with the progress he made today so good news all around.