Maddie's Surgery

Well, it looks like we will be ready to roll on Tuesday for Maddie's open heart surgery. We met with her surgeon on Thursday, and everything looked good to proceed ahead. We have had the girls locked down in the house for the past week to prevent any illness from creeping in, again! Here is the run-down for Tuesday.

Mark and I will get Maddie to Vanderbilt Children's Hospital at 5:30 in the morning. We will then go back to the holding area with her where numerous people will come by and go over surgery procedures with us, meet with the anesthesiologist, take a marker and mark her chest so they do open heart surgery and don't remove her foot by accident, etc. At 7:00 AM they will take her from us and put her under with gas. They will then put in all of her IV lines, get her bypass ready, put her all the way under and put her on a ventilator. The actual surgery will begin about 8:00 AM. Her surgeon, Dr. Carla Christian, expects to be in surgery until 1:00 PM. She will be taken directly up to the cardiac pediatric critical care unit and we wont be able to see her until about 2:00 PM. She will be kept under pretty heavy sedation until they remove the ventilator about 24-36 hours later. We will be getting updates from the OR in the waiting room via telephone every hour and a half. I will be posting any updates on the blog about every hour and half after we receive the calls.

We feel very confident with the surgeon and medical staff at Vanderbilt. Dr. Christian said that they have about a 98% success rate with this surgery, so we have good odds of this being the only surgery she needs. Dr. Christian did tell us that since one of the surgery nurses is good friends with Mark's family that we are getting the VIP team for her surgery. The nurse has hand picked every one in the OR, according to Maddie's surgeon.

Thank you to every one for the thoughts and prayers as we get ready to go through this process. God has blessed us abundantly and know he will continue to do so!

It wouldn't be a post without a picture!



We'll talk to you all on Tuesday!