Update from the Hospital

Since nothing can ever be simple, we were thrown yet another curve ball this morning when we arived for Molly's surgery. During the surgeon's briefing this morning the doctor who performed the catheterization indicated that there may actually be a second VSD, a muscular VSD, which is rather small and difficult to locate. The surgeon came in to speak with us and gave us all of this new information.

Apparently he would have to close the larger VSD, take Molly off the heart and lung machine to allow her blood to flow on its own, determine whether or not there was a smaller VSD, locate it, and finally go back on the machine to close that VSD. While he explained this to us he was much less assertive than he had been in our previous discussions. While there was no strong recommendation, he seemed happy with our decision to go with a banding for this surgery.

So Molly is in the OR as we speak. Our first update was 10 minutes ago and all was well. We'll know more in an hour, when the procedure should actually be completed.

Molly's recovery and hospital stay should be shorter with this surgery, so that's nice. Unfortunately, as you may recall from an earlier post, this is only a temporary fix. This will get her out of heart failure and ideally prevent us from having many episodes like last week's trip to the ER, but one can't tell. At any rate, if this surgery is successful, and it allows her to be comfortable, and keeps her out of heart failure - all best case scenarios - it will still require a follow-up surgery in a few months to close the VSD(s).

Stay tuned. I'll try to update again later.