Post Op Day One
I walked into PICU room 5 and was so surprised to see Liam awake and coherent! They’d told us that after such a long surgery they sometimes send them to the PICU intubated and let them wake up slowly. His body handled anesthesia really well and they extubated him even before he got to the PICU.
His body was so swollen from fluids he could hardly open his eyes, but he whispered a few words to me.
I didn’t sleep for a long time. Liam was pretty uncomfortable and his blood pressure was hovering in the 70’s over high 30’s/40’s. His heart rate was sky high. They kept telling me he was fine, but I knew he wasn’t. He was so grateful for ice chips and water that he chugged down an entire cup. His stomach wasn’t at all ready for that much water and it ricocheted right back over me a few minutes later.
At some point I crashed into a deep sleep. Poor Liam didn’t have his call bell and his voice was gone. He whispered and whispered and whispered for me, but I didn’t hear him until his monitor alarmed and I shot up like a bolt. Poor kid! I can’t imagine how helpless that felt.
They started him on a norepinephrine drip for his blood pressure. In the morning when the surgery team came in they said what he really needed was blood. He’d lost 1600 mL in the OR and had gotten three units during surgery, but his body needed more.
Night shift merged to day shift … because really that’s about the only way you know what time of the day it is in a windowless room … and his nurse was amazing! She was every ounce classic New Yorker and I found myself being told to take care of myself by someone who was going to follow up to see if I did it. She was also the reason David got special permission to come in and see Liam before returning to Virginia.
At 10 in the morning PT came by and tried to get him to the edge of the bed. He was barely out of surgery for twelve hours, but he gave it his best shot. They got him to the side of the bed, but his blood pressure plummeted and he got incredibly dizzy so they helped him straight back down. Soon after that he got a unit of blood and and increased pain meds in his epidural and he started to perk up. By evening he was checking his messages on voxer.