Congenital Heart Surgery Unit (CHSU)

Tuesday evening,  they took Ridge to the Congenital Heart Surgery Unit. This is where he has been and will continue to be until he is ready to go home.  I LOVE the CHSU.  It is seriously such a special and sacred place to be. There are so many tiny little babies here and to think about all the miracles that take place in here on a daily basis is a little overwhelming.  They are a 12 bed unit and 1/3 of their patients are under 1 month old. We've only been here a week and a half but other than babies, I've only seen one teenage girl.  They can take patients that are newborns up to age 18. Ridge has his own room and it's actually pretty spacious.  It needs to be to fit all of the monitors and machines as you can see.

 Here is Ridge's bed. They make all the babies these little name signs.

 I took this Wednesday morning.  It looked like both of his arms were in a cast. They attached these little white foam pads to both arms because they didn't want him moving his wrists or his arm where the IVs and neo PICC line were.  You can sort of see in the picture that they would also sometimes clamp the white pads to the blankets so his arm would stay down.

Wednesday morning they let him eat for the first time.  He chugged everything I had pumped so far and then drank some formula on top of that.  Unfortunately a few hours later he threw it all up. After this feeding they started feeding him through a feeding tube to be able to control exactly how much he was getting and how often.  Apparently with single ventricle babies they are worried about how much they eat because it can put stress on the intestines.  His body is already not getting all the oxygen it needs so that already can put stress on the organs and then if he eats too much it can cause long term damage to the intestines.  Because of this they were very cautious of how much they would feed him before the surgery.  I believe the max he got to was 10mL at a time. Apparently the 2 hardest things for babies to do are eat and breathe. Ridge was already using so much energy to breathe that feeding him through the tube was able to conserve some of his energy.

We were told we wouldn't be able to hold him because of all the IVs and what not but because they couldn't get the catheter in his belly button, it actually worked to our advantage.  The neo PICC in his arm was more secure than it would've been going through his belly button so it was a nice surprise when they said we could hold him.

The first 6 days of his life were spent keeping him stable and letting his little body adjust to being outside of me. While I was pregnant, Ridge didn't need to create his own oxygen so it was a big adjustment for his body after he was born.  His body had to work extra hard to just pump blood and breathe. Because of this, he slept a lot.  I know all newborn sleep a lot, but I think I saw his eyes only a few times that whole first week.  If he did open his eyes, it was for a couple seconds usually. Here we were able to get a quick picture of one of the rare times he was awake.

The one issue they were a little concerned about before his surgery was that his body was over circulating oxygen.  This meant that his organs could possibly not be getting enough oxygen because the heart was pumping oxygenated blood back to the lungs rather than out to the rest of the body. They monitor all of his organs very closely though and everything looked good so it ended up not being that big of a deal.

The boys have been adjusting to this new crazy life pretty well.  They have gone a little crazy at times and been a little emotional and high strung but I really can't be too upset with all that's going on.  They haven't seen Ridge yet, but we've taken them to the hospital a few times and let them play while one of us visited Ridge.

My dad was at a conference in Chicago when Ridge was born so he flew straight to Dallas when it was over so he could meet Ridge for the first time.

Anytime we would hold Ridge, they had to unhook everything and pile it on top of him and then transfer it all into our arms and hook it back up. This is what he'd look like before they gave him to us.

Towards the end of the week they let him try the bottle again.  It was still just a tiny amount. On Saturday when I went to visit him they let me feed him.  He chugged it in about 30 seconds.

On Sunday morning, Tagg went with my dad and Ned to give Ridge a blessing in anticipation of his surgery on Monday. How grateful I am for the priesthood power and for worthy men in my life to call upon that power when we are in need.  My mom and I went up Sunday afternoon and Ridge was wide awake for about 5 minutes. We were able to feed him again but he didn't want much to do with it.  He'd suck on the bottle but wouldn't swallow anything.

One of the side affects of Ridge's heart condition and the medication he was on is that it causes him to swell.  It made me so sad to see these little toes all swollen.  They looked like little sausages that were about to pop.

Sunday evening there was a lot of anxiousness about his surgery the next day.  I actually started feeling really sick Sunday night and it was all I could do to walk.  I wasn't sure what was going on but I took some medicine in hopes I would feel better on Monday for his surgery.