Surgery # 2 complete

We (Mark and I) arrived in Milwaukee yesterday afternoon (we were about an hour or so behind Micah). The NICU here is PACKED and he's sharing a room. They moved one baby out this afternoon so now there are just two of them in there. But his roommate is fairly high maintenance and cries a lot so it's rather loud in there. Anyway...

We were at the hospital rather late last night because it took a while for Micah to get "cleared" by the cardiology team. And as Mark says, the surgery is sort of the side show... the main event is the anesthesia. So we spent some time with the anesthesiology team this morning. They changed his anesthesiologist this morning. Not sure if it was intentional, but he ended up with the Chief.

Micah made it through surgery just fine. He has been very uncomfortable most of the afternoon, though. I think they shot low on the dose of morphine due to his heart condition, and adding a dose of Tylenol didn't improve things much. It was so hard hearing him scream in pain. He's usually a pretty laid back baby. They up'd his morphine and he seems to be settling in well this evening. He had an elevated temperature and an elevated heart rate around 5:00, but both are back to normal now.

The surgeon went ahead and put in a MIC-Key button (which, strangely, is a K-C product). I had been told that he would likely get one in a few weeks and that he would start with the feeding tube being longer while the incision healed. I guess that's one less thing to take care of later. The button is basically resting against his skin and has a sort of cap to open and attach a feeding tube (making it less bulky under his clothing). Micah is receiving IV fluids today and they'll begin feeding him through his tube tomorrow. We don't know how long we'll be here, but I'm hoping it's just a few more days. It all depends how quickly Micah's system handles the recovery from surgery (aka, how quickly food makes its way through his system).

It's interesting being back after being in Neenah for 3.5 weeks. The baby who was next door to Micah back in early January is still in the same location and it was fun to see her mom again. And we have gotten some double-takes from some nurses to whom we then say, "We're baaaack." Micah's nurse overnight was someone we hadn't met yet, but we have a mutual friend: she attends church with a friend of mine from jr high / high school and this nurse has been praying for Micah since before he was born (our friend put him on his church's prayer list). Isn't God awesome!?

Oh, and we did get into the Ronald McDonald House again. What a huge blessing! It definitely has helped us that we have arrived on a weekend day both times we came down here. Mark headed back to Neenah this afternoon and he'll come back to get us when Micah is discharged.

Thank you for your continued prayers for Micah. We can't wait to bring him home.