Well, Children's Hospital in D.C. is the place to be when your kid has wild and crazy surgery complications. I just finished talking to one of my baby's doctors.
Right now, my baby has a 30 centimeter piece of plastic tubing inside her heart. This is a rare complication of having a special kind of IV called a "PIC line." None of the doctors at the NICU have seen this before, but the heart doctors who will do the surgery say this does happen and they know how to fix it.
There is the "easy" way to remove the plastic tubing and a "hard" way. Easy would be to put my kid in some type of real time x-ray, have a specially trained heart doctor go up a vein in her leg and pull out the tube. Hard way is to do open heart surgery.
The heart doctors say that a) its good the tube is so long, because it's easier to remove a big piece rather than a small piece and b) Tessie's heart beat is still totally normal. (one of the worries is that she'd develop a heart problem, but that hasn't happened.)
They scheduled her procedure for first thing tomorrow morning, unless they can get it into the room later this afternoon.
In this exact moment, I'm feeling pretty calm. (Go Carmel!) It's really wonderful to be here with my husband. We keep reminding ourselves that God gave us the grace to get through this trial in one piece on our wedding day. Though Jon did say "If this is year nine, what does God have in store for us at year 39?"
Many, many thanks for all of your prayers and kind comments. You all keep me going!
(Susan -I almost called you for a ride this morning. Must have been a Mary thing!)
