Update on Day 4: Sharon's Visit

It's Sharon blogging. No big changes with Evie today. I learned that her surgeon, Dr. Ilbawi (who is the Chief of Surgery and has performed about twenty thousand pediatric heart operations) personally did manual bagging on Evie this morning, becuase it lets him get a bettter feel for her current lung capacity and function. That means that he turned off her ventilator and stood there sqeezing a bag to force air into her lungs. Personally. He could have assigned that task to any of the staff cardiologists, but he didn't. He is amazing and he truly cares about his patients.

Here is a picture of her bed and almost all of the machines around it (there is actually one more ventilation machine off to the right in the photo)! Every one of those machines (except the two large LCD screens) feeds some sort of medication.

Today she had two tests to get a better idea of why there is still some blood in her lungs and why her lungs are not yet strong enough to get off that darn ECMO machine. The first test was a transesophageal echo (allowing views of her heart from inside her esophagus), and the second was a flexible bronchoscopy (sending a scope into her airways to see what problems may exist there.) We have not yet heard the results but will post them when we do.



She woke up briefly while I was there, and I could tell she just wants to get the heck outta there.



Here she is trying to tell us how much she hates her wrist restraint:



Back at home, Gavin spent the morning and part of the afternoon with Nana & Grandpa Cermak. Then after I got home, we had a play date with our twin friends, Felix and Pierre and their mom Kelly.





At first the boys stayed close to us and just stared at each other, but they soon started exploring and playing:



Time for Felix and Pierre to leave - I think Gavin wanted to go home with them!

Gavin and Felix watch Pierre get in the car first:

We'll get together again sometime soon!