The Glenn

The last few days have been a bit of a whirlwind…

After the Cardiac Catheter, the pressing question on our minds was “When is the next surgery?”. Normally after they complete the procedure they like to get straight onto it but in our case we had one little snag. Our Cardiac Surgeon was in Perth for the week and wouldn’t return until the next Tuesday. All the doctors told us that once he got back, he would choose the date and we would be full steam ahead. We spent the Easter Weekend considering our options:
Option 1: Nelson picks a date for later that week, much later. After all he has just gotten back so he wouldn’t want to do her surgery straight away. He would want time to prepare alongside all his other cases.
Option 2: He would choose a date next week. Possibly on the Monday. This one seemed to make the most sense to us.

Tuesday began just like any other day; in fact Jess found some time to finally go baby shopping. We have prepared so much for being in Brisbane, not so much when it comes to when she gets home. In the midst of choosing prams and car seats, Jess got a call from the hospital. They had chosen a date. She gave me a call straight away to tell me that they had picked tomorrow for surgery. “Tomorrow!??” was my reply. We honestly did not believe it would be THAT soon. But after our initial shock wore off, we began to see it as a good thing. If we had been told that it was next week then we would have spent our days becoming more and more anxious about it. This was probably the best way. We just had to suck it up and prepare for the fact that she was going in for surgery and that no date we would have been given would have been perfect. We became even more settled once we spoke with Nelson about the ins and outs of her surgery; for some reason he has a great ability to always put us at ease. Jess made sure to ask him at the end if he had any plans to move in the next few years because we definitely want him to do Riley’s third surgery. He replied with a laugh that he wasn’t going anywhere. I think he gets asked that question quite a lot.

 

The following morning we got up early and spent as much time as we could with her. We have been through this process so many times over the past few months that it hasn’t necessarily gotten easier but I think we are just less anxious about it. We handed her over to the doctors and then spent the day distracting ourselves as best we could. Many people had asked us if this surgery was less risky. And I guess the short answer is Yes and No. The Glenn as they like to call it (or Bi-Directional Glenn Shunt as it’s actually called); is still a major operation and it begins the process of making the heart much less reliant on the shunt. Its main goal is to increase blood flow throughout the body. Even though Riley’s last operation required quite a lot of re-plumbing of her hearts anatomy, there was still significant work to be done this time too. The only difference is that she is older and has had time to grow stronger meaning she can recover quicker (in theory). I think that was why when it came time for surgery, we didn’t feel shattered like we did last time. We have seen months of Riley being stable, we had a surgeon we couldn’t be more happy with and last but certainly not least we had our faith that God did a good thing in her life the last time and He would see it through this time too. 

We received a call around 1:45pm from the PICU letting us know that Riley had returned from surgery and that we could see her in 45 minutes. By the time we came to the PICU to see her, we were met by one of the receptionists who let us know they would need another ten minutes and if we could wait in the parents lounge. I remember the last time she had major surgery we ended up waiting an extra three hours to see her, ten minutes really was no sweat for us. They stayed true to their word this time and ten minutes later we got to see her. I expected her to look very puffy and have a multitude of wires and tubes everywhere. And even though the latter was true, she still looked very much like herself just a little worse for wear. Nelson let us know that everything had gone according to plan and nothing out of the ordinary had occurred during surgery. That is the phrase every Heart Kid Parent loves to hear “Nothing out of the ordinary”. 

So far Riley has had her breathing tube removed and is on low flow oxygen. She had a stellar night and the only hiccup that occurred was when she woke up and wanted to let everyone know that she was quite unimpressed with her current predicament. Her sats dropped lower than they would have liked but otherwise “nothing out of the ordinary” from what they expect from a baby after a Glenn surgery. The next few days will consist of sitting around the PICU and reacquainting ourselves with all our old nurses, doctors and surroundings here. Ideally her stay won’t be very long and she will progress up to the ward yet again, I am sure I won’t be able to restrain myself and will post all her little victories along the way on Instagram/Facebook…