Still here.....

We are still here. As I guessed we were not able to go home today and I know that we won't be able to go tomorrow as well. We were unable to remove Owen from the oxygen today. When we tried his oxygen saturation dropped to low into the 60's for the medical people out there. Don't freak out though the goal after this surgery is 75 to 85 %. When we were admitted his sats were only 65 so he would have benefited from some oxygen at home. This kid does great despite the problems. For the none medical people out there your oxygen saturation for me and You should be around 100% unless you smoke which is bad for you by the way and it stinks. I have talked with the doctors and asked why we don't have an improvement in his saturation's and they say it takes time sometimes for things to go back to normal. Owen also has some pulmonary hypertension which could be the problem behind this whole thing now. With Owens new anatomy half of his bodies blood is draining into his lungs passively. So if he has pulmonary hypertension the blood can not flow into the lungs because there is to much pressure that it is going against. In a normal heart your right ventricle is able to pump all of this blood through with no difficulty unless you smoke. They have medications for this and the main one is viagra. Yes it can help you breath and have an erection at the same time. In Owens case it will help decrease pulmonary hypertension. We have not started that yet we will wait and see over the next day or so.

Chelsea was able to get some better sleep last night. Owen was back on his normal sleeping routine with the chest tubes out and has not even required any pain meds since the chest tubes came out. Other than that Owen and I watched baby Einstein 10 times today, we also walked up and down the hall in the red wagon with oxygen about 20 times laughing all the way. Chelseas dad came by to visit and brought some good home cooked food for us all including home made ice cream sandwiches. Good thoughts for tomorrow for improving conditions because we are going slightly crazy in the little closet that they call a room. Sorry it's short but I lack energy to do more and I have to do some laundry. I hope that you got the take home message that smoking is bad and you should take care of your normally functioning heart and lungs...