Our journey at Children's continues

So we are still at Children's ... and possibly heading into another surgery tomorrow afternoon.

Thankfully, Luke's heart is doing great, but they have discovered that his left diaphragm is paradoxical. What that means is that it is working in the opposite direction it's supposed to. When it's supposed to be expanding and opening, it's contracting and vice versa. In a baby, and especially a baby who just had the Glenn operation, this can interfere with his lung capacity. That is why they are thinking his saturation levels haven't come up to where they'd like them to be. Over the weekend, they were thinking it was the fluid perfusion in his lung, but are now leaning towards this diaphragm abnormality to be the cause of his lower sat's.

So, what does this mean? There is a procedure they can do called a diaphragm plication, where they surgically go through Luke's side and put a series of stitches into Luke's diaphragm to cause it to lay flat and not work against his left lung. They are going to do one more study this afternoon to get an even better look at the way Luke's diaphragm is working and from there make the decision to operate or not. If they decide to, it would be tomorrow around 5 p.m. It's a fairly quick procedure, but one where Luke would have to go under anesthesia again, and probably stay one night in the ICU to be monitored. It would probably keep us here an extra four or five days for recovery.

Rog and I are kind of numb to the idea of another surgery, which is probably a blessing from God. We trust the doctors here implicitly and they have been conferring with our cardiologist in Tacoma as well. I know they will only do this surgery if they truly believe it will help Luke in the long run. It definitely feels like a huge step backwards, but again are finding thankfulness in that they can diagnose and fix issues like this.

I will let you know what they find out in the test this afternoon. Please pray that Luke's diaphragm would actually be working correctly and the God would give the doctors perfect wisdom in their decision-making.