The Waiting Game

I dislike the waiting part of the day almost as much as I dislike soothing the increasingly cranky 4-year old who at Day 2 has already proclaimed she is "all done" with the hospital.

So far this morning has gone off without a hitch. It was a fight to get Clare to take her normal morning meds, so the anesthesiologist gave her Versed (the mellow drug) through her IV instead of orally. (Amy - I totally understand now when you said Avery would just lose it if anyone came near her.) Clare is definitely at her limit with being poked, prodded, stuck, and wired up. We met with the team of doctors and nurses this morning, and the Big Cahuna went over the procedure and even drew a neat little diagram on the dry erase board for us. Depending on what they find when they actually enter Clare's vessels, the procedure may take anywhere from 3-6 hours. So we have some LONG waiting ahead of us. They are going to access the vessels through her groin and put in an arterial monitoring line as well (which I am not crazy about because that is what originally caused this whole mess in the first place almost four years ago!). Some things are still undecided such as how they are going to close off the vessels, whether they can save the radial artery, whether Clare will need a blood transfusion, yada yada yada. So we're just going to wait, wait, wait, and see. We are not allowed to stay with Clare when she is prepped and intubated, so we said our good-byes as they wheeled her away. She was extremely mellow at that point.

Thank you for all the thoughts and prayers this morning. I keep thinking that this is going to get easier some day, but the huge pit in my stomach always comes back as we prepared to hand our little princess over. In the words of our current hospital-expert Amy, "Prepare to be unprepared."