Surgery plans

We met with Dr. Stewart today. He is our new cardiothoracic surgeon.

The meeting went well, although it didn't go as well for the kids. The plan was to have child life take the kids during the meeting. They were going to take the kids on a little tour and have a little "pre-surgery" talk with Ethan (and Callie). We were really looking forward to this since this will be the first big surgery Ethan's had since he was 6 months old! He's only had heart caths during the past 4 1/2 years. Unfortunately child life never showed up and did anything with the kids so they came into the meeting with us. Oh well. Ethan still enjoyed checking out Dr. Stewart's office and watching him draw "broken heart" diagrams on his whiteboard.

Well, the plan is pretty much the same as my previous explanation. Dr. Stewart plans on going in through the left side of Ethan's chest. They will separate Ethan's ribs. That will give them access to his lungs and veins. The plan is to deflate his left lung, go in through that lung to access his good arteries that are in the bottom left portion. They are pretty much not getting much use currently because his homograft keeps clotting off and the stenosis in his veins don't allow much blood flow down to this area of his lung. They will connect the new shunt to an artery in this portion of the lung and attach it to his aorta/carotid artery. This will allow a great blood supply to feed into his lung. The hope is that if everything goes perfectly with this surgery it will increase his oxygen saturations by about 10%! That will put him up in the 70s and perhaps near 80%! That would be such a blessing!

Dr. Stewart commented that Ethan certainly has "spit and spunk" but his color matched his shorts today. He was wearing his bright blue shorts. Lol. He definitely thinks that is something that needs to be addressed immediately, and hopefully this will do the job.

He did agree that if this helps him out a lot that we can do the other side to help out bloodflow to the right lung. He wasn't agreeing with the plan to connect the pulmonary arteries, but that'll be something to look at later down the road. This isn't a long-term fix, but it should definitely help now and for a while. It will still give us enough time to try and come up with a more permanent solution for him.

And this is a fairly safe alternative. Dr. Stewart didn't want to do anything too radical on him becuase he is so difficult. A lot of really complex plans were presented at the surgical conferences, but apparently he wants to take a slow and safe process. This is fine with us right now since we're still looking at making improvements. If this does not work (like the new shunt lets in too much bloodflow and clots, or gets stenosed and clots) then we're basically right back where we are now. He said this won't damage his lung anymore than it already is. It also won't stop us from being able to do anything different in the future (like changing bloodflow for transplant, separation, etc).

The plan right now is to have Ethan go in for his cath June 18th. We'll do the cath and hopefully everything will be smooth and safe there. The 20th will be the day for surgery. He's expecting it to take pretty much all day. Hopefully it could be shorter since there's not much scar tissue where he'll be working, but Ethan never tends to have quick procedures. Ever. Even his caths take 9 hours! He expects to have a week or two in hospital for recovery. We just pray for a really quick and easy recovery! He'll have a huge horizontal incision (around 4 inches). Dr. Stewart said we'll just add it to the collection there. *sigh* Poor boy.

Please continue to keep us all in your prayers. We have a lot to do to get ready for this and still have to figure out how/how much/and what exactly to tell Ethan to prepare him for this.

I'll post up another blog post in the next day or two about our end of school and zoo trip. :)