Day 34 - Surgery Again

Over the last few days the surgical team has come to talk with me and we were told Thursday was the soonest they could get us in. Because Jonah isn't considered an emergency surgery, we have to wait for an opening on the surgical calendar (not popular with me but I do understand it). On top of that, there's a surgical conference that has many of the surgeons gone and the surgeon who completed Jonah's thoroscopic surgery last time (Dr. Lal) was on vacation with his family. So Dr. Aiken was going to be our surgeon this time. Which he actually was in the gallery watching Dr. Lal performing the last surgery, so he joked that he had probably jinxed us by saying that he had never seen a thoroscopic surgery so artfully done.

We were told the surgery was going to be at 10am so we were NPO (no feedings) all day. We didn't meet the surgeon himself before we went in for surgery, but we met the anestiologist. I had asked a lot of questions and of course we'd been through it before so I felt comfortable with how things were going to go and was less scared this time. I was still scared of course but couldn't wait for this to be behind us!

Because Jonah had already had the thoroscopic surgery and reherniated, they wanted to do open surgery this time. So Jonah would have a little bit longer recovery time and would have a large scar but we kind of expected that and it didn't surprise us. If that's what they needed to do to see clearly and repair the hernia properly, we supported it. Since we were on the 7th floor, the procedure was a bit different, the surgical team didn't come to the NICU to pick him up, we were delivered by a transport employee to the surgical holding area. We had to wait a long time because they kept delaying his surgery because more emergency surgeries came up. I started to get nervous that they wouldn't do it at all...we ended up being the very last person in the huge surgical waiting room that night.

Dr. Aiken met with us right before the surgery and told us Jonah was considerably more stable than the last time and he expected everything would go fine. He was hoping to actually take him off the ventilator right in the OR. Jonah was so angry after not being allowed to eat all day so it was tough to hear him crying and not be able to do anything. After we handed him off to the surgical assistant, we went to the waiting room. By now we knew the drill so we tried to read magazines and talk about happier things and eat. After a while we got an update that said things were going OK, then it was quite a bit longer before we heard they were done. Because there was literally no one left in the waiting room, Dr. Aiken just came out to talk to us there. He is a very talkative doctor so we chatted for quite a while about CDH and the Ladd's procedure (where they move the intestines around to try to approximate the way they should be aligned).

It was very late by now so we waited for Jonah to be taken back to the NICU and just peeked in on him before heading back to the Ronald McDonald House to sleep.