Quick is the Beat of my Heart

The fateful day has come and passed. I am typing this entry from the Intensive Care Unit of the hospital where the mini-BG is being treated. Yes, you can even surf the Web from inside a hospital room--and on a wireless keyboard no less.

All of which is, of course, secondary to the reason MLW and I are here.

Based on the evidence of the past couple days, I'd have to say that it appears the Beach Ghostlette has the same constitution as her mother (16 / +3 bonus). I dare say that I probably would not have held up quite so well--hell, a bout of intestinal distress knocked me on my ass for two days.

MLW and I arrived at the hospital around 6:15 am on Wednesday and had to relinquish the baby outside the operating room at around 7:30. Then...we waited. Although we were told ahead of time that the mini-BG would only be on bypass (read: her heart would not be beating) for only a half-hour at the most, getting to and from that point would take around 4 hours. I think it was a bit longer than that, but eventually the anesthesiologist emerged to tell us that the surgery was complete. We spoke to the surgeon a few minutes after that, and he informed us that he had removed a portion of the tumor about the size of two thumbs placed together. This was sent to pathology for analysis, which confirmed what we had suspected: fibroma. Which meant that the chances of it subsiding on its own were small.

It took almost another hour for a bed in the ICU to become available (like most hospitals, space is generally at a premium; it's like the axiom about traffic always expanding to clog freeways, regardless of how many lanes are added), and when we finally got to see her she was splayed spread-eagle on a bed that dwarfed her by a considerable margin, each limb and orifice (including a few new ones in her chest) displaying a tube or wire of some sort or another. It makes for a lengthy litany: two metal leads attached to her heart that could be plugged into a pacer, a chest tube to drain excess fluid, a couple shunts that allowed the docs and nurses to inject medication to her recently repaired muscles, arterial shunts, a blood pressure cuff, a catheter, a ventilator, and--perhaps the ultimate indignity--a rectal thermometer kept in place with tape.

The first night was her roughest. Her heart was beating over 200 times a minute when she was placed in her room, and remained in the high 190s throughout the night. It was during this period that we realized what a precarious house of cards the recovery period is. The drugs they give to stabilize one system can adversely effect other systems if not given in the right doses. So the staff had to monitor her heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen saturation percentage, urine output and so on and so forth, ad infinitum. We were able to get to sleep that night--mostly due to exhaustion--but the night was far from restful.

Fortunately, things have improved considerably since then. This morning her chest tubes were removed, and there is even talk of taking her off the ventilator later today.

But was it worth it? Although my logical brain realizes that this was definitively the course we needed to take, my doubting Thomas side still wants to probe the wound--I want to see that her heart is now more "normal," and that the tumor won't decide to stage a comeback, and that we didn't put our daughter (and ourselves) through all this trauma for nothing.