We arrived at the Cleveland Clinic Children's Hospital around 6:00 and check in at a step-down unit for pre-surgery vitals and check-in. Both sets of Ava's grandparents as well as her Aunt Christina were there to wish her well.
Teresa and I escorted Ava to the Operating Room, and though it was difficult to turn her heart into surgeon's hands we knew that it she would be in the best set of hands to see Ava to a normal life.
Ava's surgery took a little over eight hours.
It consisted of...
- Anesthesia & Cooling Down of Ava's Body
- Placing Ava on the artificial heart-lung machine for open heart surgery
- Stopping Ava's heart (her heart was stopped for about 54 minutes)
- Sewing a Gore-Tex patch the the septal wall that seperates the ventricles
- Repairing an ASD between the atria
- Starting Ava's heart back up
- Removing Ava from the artificial heart-lung machine
- Using a cloth-like substance to fuse her sternum back together
- Dermabonding Ava's chest wound together and securing with steri-strips
The surgery was a success.
Per the surgeon, theVSD was the size of a quarter (which judging by the total size of Ava's heart was a pretty significant hole).
There were some signs that Ava was going into post-operation condition called "heart block" so an external pace-maker was used for about an hour to keep her beats in rhythm, however, by the time we met back up with Ava in the ICU she was using the pace maker in standy-mode (it would only pace her heart if she fell underneath 120 BPM).
Though she was starting to swell and was sedated on a ventilator in the ICU, the outlook for Ava was pretty high.
She had a central line in her neck, an arterial line in her arm, the external pacer wires going into her heart through her chest and some drainage tubes in her chest for any excess fluid.
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