The good news is that the echo results came back and his heart repair looks "excellent" according to Dr. Reddy. The only change since surgery is his mitral valve, which was at a gradient of 5 is now anywhere from 7-11, but mostly between 7 and 8. This is common with patients who are lying in bed and not active. She feels it should resolve as he becomes more mobile.
Also, his x-ray was greatly improved over the night before. So that is the right direction. Unfortunately, it is not improved enough to say goodbye CPAP.
They are going to go slowly with the wean off of the support. His heart isn't quite healed enough, even though the repair looks so good. So it is not fair of us to expect it to do so. He is back on Milrinone to help his heart relax and he seems to do well on that, so that will stay. They will wean him down from his Dex a little each day and see how he does. His Ativan will go down a little tomorrow. As for his CPAP support (called PEEP). they just lowered that to 8 from 10.
He needs to go slowly, so I'm very glad the docs aren't trying to go too fast.
The problem is, of course, that this all prolongs our CVICU exit. It could be a week, it could be several. We just have to wait it out.
The other thing is the eating. He can't. So they will place an ND (duodenal) tube to start using nutrition other than TPN and Lipids. Those are not ideal. And neither is tube feeding in normal situations but for now, that's what is best and I just hope he tolerates it. There is a considerable amount of PTSD surrounding feeding tubes for me, as you could imagine.
If we have to be here beyond the middle of August then Jason will have to head home and we will fly home when he is ready. I hate to spend too much energy worrying or planning for that, but it is not an unlikely possibility.
So right now we are very thankful for the good echo report and we will go from there.
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