Successful Surgery!

Lucy's surgery today was a success! Her esophagus and stomach are officially connected and she no longer has a double aortic arch. We could not be happier and more thankful for such a wonderful outcome.

As you know, Jason is in Thailand, so my mom and dad were here to keep me company and wait with me. We headed over to the hospital at 7:45 am, right when the NICU opened, so that we could spend some time with Lucy before they took her to surgery. The transport team came around 8:15 to move Lucy to the Pediatric surgery unit, which I accompanied them to. I talked to the surgeons and nurses for a few minutes and comforted Lucy to the best of my ability while she was in her transport isolette. I held it together fairly well while talking through the possible outcomes until the surgeon said, "...although the likelihood is very small, I have to tell you that a possible outcome is death." While I conceptually knew that is always a risk of surgery, to hear it out loud was awful.

By 9 am, Lucy had been taken to surgery and I was in the waiting area with mom and dad. The surgery took about 4 1/2 hours...possibly the longest 4 1/2 hours of my life. At around 1:30 pm, the surgeon came out with a smile on her face giving us the thumbs up and came over to tell us that it went great - better than she had anticipated. They found a spot in her double aortic arch that did not have any blood flow, so used that as the location to sever it and took care of that first. While her gap was quite long, the surgeon said that the tissue was flexible and stretchy enough to be joined together. She did note that there is a lot of tension on the tissue, so the risk of a leak is quite high.

Lucy was taken to the level I NICU for post-op and I got to visit her for a few minutes around 3 pm. She was just waking up from her anesthesia, but was still very sleepy. The goal for the next few days is to keep her very calm and on a ventilator so that her lungs, trachea and esophagus can recover. She will hopefully be taken of the ventilator in the next few days and re-introduced to food through her feeding tube as well. Overall, her recovery is going very well so far and she seems very peaceful.



THANK YOU for all of your prayers and encouragement. We know that they were heard and that God was blessing the hands of her surgical team today. Lucy is a fighter for sure!