I forgot to add.....

We also got Kate's chest x-rays at PCMC for her personal records. I thought it would be cool to add to the blog. They would take an x-ray of her every day to check for things like pleural effusions and check all of her monitoring lines.


So here is Kate's chest one day before her surgery at one week old. The report states her heart was mildly enlarged. :(

Here is her chest about 2 hours after her surgery. The twistie tie looking things down her sternum are wires to hold the sternum back together as they had to saw it open to access her heart. I have also heard they remove the thymus gland in order to access the heart. I guess she didn't need it?? The smaller wirey things are a temporary pacemaker threaded from her heart through her abdomen and they were placed inside tubes taped to her stomach. She also has chest tubes and all kinds of other crazy stuff that I don't remember.

Here is a post op lateral view of the wires that remain around her sternum. My girl has bling!!!! I look at that and wonder, will those things hold up as she grows??? She does have these weird bumps on her skin just under her sternum that I have wondered about. I asked other heart parents about their children and possible problems with wires. Some parents say they can feel their children's wires or they have weird bumps too. Maybe the sternum just fuses back differently in each person.

I think the view of her heart and all the little vessels in this xray are cool to look at.

They also took some pics of her abdomen probably to check the placement of the feeding tube and catheters. The report states she has mild gaseous distention of bowel loops. In other words, she has a bit of her father in her too!!! HaHAHaHaaaa!!!!

Wow, the wonders of modern medicine.