It’s 2:03 in the morning and Maddy has been in surgery for 9 hours. Kim, the transplant coordinator, came out a little while ago to give us an update. Maddy needed to be on the heart lung bypass machine because her CF lungs could not oxygenate her blood during surgery. Here is what happens, they test the patients ability to maintain good O2 saturation by closing off one lung. If it’s good with only the one they will allow that lung to keep working while they take the other one out and replace it with the transplant lung. Then the new lung gets going and they see if that one can keep good saturation while replacing the last one. Maddy’s lungs could not keep her blood oxygenated during the surgery so they put her on the bypass machine for the whole procedure.
The complications involved with this are a little disconcerting but nothing she can’t overcome. First there is the problem of the transplant lungs being “off” for such a ling time. They will obviously take longer to start up again and be able to maintain her O2 levels so they have to ween her off the machine. They sometimes have to give an aerosolized drug called nitric oxide to help the new lungs be able to oxygenate the blood. That is what they are doing for Maddy right now. Second, because they don’t want her blood to clot while on the machine they have to use blood thinners. After being on the machine so long there is the possibility that there will be “weeping” of blood into her chest cavity. So they have to keep an eye on that and may possibly have to go back in to clear any discharge that may result. Hopefully this won’t happen!
After Kim explained all of this to us the surgeon came out to give us an update. He said that she was very sick so he was not surprised that the surgery took so long. He explained about the bypass machine again but with a little less detail than Kim. He also said that Maddy had some kind of problem with her pulmonary artery and they had to do some reconstruction of that area. He was sure that would all be fine. He seemed rather concerned at just how bad her old lungs were. I think the disease was worse than any one expected. Maddy is so strong and always puts up such a great front I think everyone was surprised to see exactly how sick she really was. He said that overall she did very well and he was optimistic about her recovery but that it would be lengthy.
Those are all the facts I know at the moment. From the conversations I have just had with Kim and the surgeon I will hazard a guess that Maddy’s recovery will be harder and longer than anyone thought before. I am sure that Maddy has some hard days ahead of her but I am also sure that she will attack them with a determination like no one else I know!
More to come...
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