A Big Setback

Well, today was not as good as yesterday. Actually, it was pretty rough for all of us. We started off to the hospital today with both Corbin and Dexter sobbing for us to stay with them. They are so tired of us leaving them everyday. It broke both our hearts to hear them so sad. It is very hard on our sweet boys to have their parents leave them everyday to visit their sister that the never get to see.

When we made it to the hospital at about 11:30am, Ivy's room was full of doctors all running around frantically. One nurse told us that Ivy had been having some trouble breathing earlier so they had decided to take an x-ray of her chest to see if she had some fluid in her lungs. On the x-ray they noticed a dark spot in the piece of tube they had added during her surgery a week and a half ago. They did an Echo scan to verify and they believed it was a blood clot. The tube basically allows blood to get from the heart to the lungs and if the clot were to get any bigger or break free, it would be catastrophic. So they told us that they needed to take her into emergency surgery and remove the clot. They said she would get all the tubes, wires, and IV's that she has worked so hard to get out, all put back in. It was very devastating to us. They put the breathing tube back in and prepared her to go back to the operating room. The surgeons told us that this operation was a lot more risky than the first one, because her body is still trying to recover. They did not know how her little body was going to handle it. They put her on blood thinners to try to prevent the clot from getting worse. They said if the clot were to break free during the operation, it could cause cardiac arrest or massive bleeding.

After a few hours of her being in the OR, the surgeons informed us that they were able to re-open the chest, re-open the ribcage, and take a look at the tube. To everyone's relief, it was not a clot! There was just a peice of the tube folding over onto itself. This was still something that needed to be fixed so it was good that they did the surgery. They told us that she was having a bleeding problem though (I believe it was because of the blood thinners) so they still had to get that under controll. After the bleeding was taken care of, they let us see her. She was very swollen again, she had the jugular IV back in, she had the heart IV's and heart pacemaker wires back in. She only had 2 drainage tubes instead of 4 this time, and they were able to close up her chest immediatley this time, so it is a little better. Basically she is back to where she was last monday and she is going to have to go through all that healing again. Please pray for our baby Ivy to have the strength to do it all again. Pray for our boys to be strong too. Thank you all for your love and support.