Hurry Up and Wait

Last night was an interesting night. I waited until Mallory fell asleep and then drove Mom back to the RMH. When I got back to the hospital Mallory was in "soft" restraints. While I was gone, Mallory decided it was time to take the ET tube out. She had taken the tape off one side of her face and had her hand wrapped around the tube ready to pull when her nurse walked in to check on her. She also was pulling at her pacer wires and the dressing on her chest incision. She's just telling the doctors and nurses she is ready to go! :) While I was in the room with her she did not have to have her hand in restraints. They did however, give her a little something to make her sleepy. She slept well the rest of the night.

The hardest part of her being awake and having the ET tube in, is she is communicating with me with her big blue eyes and the small amount of sign language I have taught her. She was signing Please and then pointing to her ET and NG tubes and had big tears running down her cheeks. It broke my heart!

When you are in a specialized unit in the hospital you get to know your neighbors. Most of which are Mom's, not all but most. I have struck up a friendship, or should I say kinship with Janice, better known as Tessa Marie's mom. Tessa is 7 months old and waiting for a new heart. Last night Tessa and Mallory shared a nurse, Kathe. Kathe came into Mallory's room at 10:15 and said "When you get a minute Tessa's mom would like to talk to you". Mal was asleep so I went right next door. Janice was crying when I walked in (and so was Tessa). I asked her what was wrong and all she could do was shake her head for a minute, catch her breath and then told me, "They have a heart for Tessa". Then I started crying. Tessa has been listed for 11 days and was told she would be lucky if she made it waiting for a heart. Tessa was back up to the CICU with her new heart by noon today! She is not out of the woods yet because the heart was out of body for 4 hours, but she made it through surgery and that is the first of many baby steps. I know you will all say a little prayer for Tessa and her family.

Back to the Princess. :) She did very well through her heart cath. Dr. Balzer did the cath and told me her pressures were a bit high but they expected that and he feels these numbers were lower than what they would have been a week ago. There is no blockage and they did get the samples for the biopsy. We wont know what the results are until later today. She was the first case this morning so results should be in by 5pm. As usual they had to give her a large amount of sedatives to get her to sleep, so it is taking her longer to come out of it. Since she is still asleep the ET tube is still in. She is chewing on it as I am writing this. We are still hopeful she will get that tube out today. I'll let you all know resultsas soon as I know something.

Mallory may be a TV star yet. Today was the ribbon cutting ceremony for the CICU. The local news stations were here and they took some pictures of Mallory in her CICU room after she came back from the cath lab. She actually had a hard time getting to her room because there were so many people in the hall from the ceremony. Mom and I got to meet Maxine Chase and Bob Fox, founders of Build a Bear Workshop. Bob even gave us hugs!