I'm exhausted, but very relieved.
The important news: the operation was a success, the surgeon, Dr D. Craig Miller, bless his cowboy boots, managed to spare the aortic valve (he'd given us a 99% probability of being able to do so beforehand), so we don't have to be concerned about pig/cow valves for now, and mechanical valves later. He was reluctant to say that her own valve will last her the rest of her life, but it should last a "long time, long enough to have a family".
When I left the hospital, Sarah was in intensive care, extubated, conscious, and talking to me, but very very tired. She's got a daunting array of things coming out of her at the moment (a lot of which I couldn't see because she had blankets over her). It's been a long day, so I decided to head home, rather than potentially keeping her awake for the next two ICU visiting times tonight.
Here's the time line that I recorded:
05:15 - Arrive at the hospital to go through the admissions process
06:35 - I leave Sarah shortly before they're going to wheel her off to the operating room (I'll get into my fun at the end).
09:30 - I ask for an update, and they tell me she's going on bypass
10:30 - It looks like they can save the aortic valve
12:25 - Still doing the valve stuff, making a new sinus of Valsalva
14:15 - I ask for another update, everything is going okay, someone will come out to talk to me
14:55 - Still going, at least another hour until they start to close up
15:15 - Closing up, surgeon will be out to talk to me
16:10 - Surgeon comes out to talk to me about how the operation went
16:50 - I got to see Sarah briefly in the ICU, she was still intubated, but conscious and seemed to respond to my voice
~18:15 - Extubated. Spoke with her briefly. She was very tired, and I decided to let her rest for the remaining visiting times and go home and get some rest myself
So what the surgeon had to say for himself was very interesting indeed. He didn't end up doing exactly what he'd said previously, based on how things looked once he actually got in there.
He said that the sinuses of Valsalva were paper thin. So thin, you could see the blood flowing through them. They were about 0.5mm thick, rather than the normal 1.5mm thick. Sounds a bit like a disaster waiting to happen. Apparently it's not possible to detect this with imaging, you have to get in there and see it for yourself. He didn't end up removing as much of the aorta as previously planned (specifically the part around the transcending arch) as whilst the diameter was a bit bigger, the tissue apparently looked healthy. He said the part of the aorta he did remove (preceding where the braciocephalic, left common carotid and left subclavian arteries branch off) was "cheesy" in consistency, so it's not like she just happened to have an enlarged aorta, no aneurysm, and way too thin sinuses of Valsalva. There was definitely some unhealthiness to the aortic tissue, just not as bad as thought from the imaging.
So it's all good. I think she'll spend a day or two more in the ICU before getting moved to a normal ward, but it's too soon to say what's going on with all of that. There's some elevated risk of stroke due to blood clots for the next 24-48 hours, but she's on blood thinners, so it shouldn't be a problem.
The day was pretty crazy for me. I'm not sure if it was stress, or the stomach bug that's been doing the rounds of Central Park Apartments, but I went to bed last night at 11pm, was up again at 1am, with shall we say, a gastrointestinal upset, and up again at 3am, throwing up. We got up at 4:15am to get to the hospital.
I felt really nauseous all morning, and was an absolute wreck while I was in with Sarah when they were putting a peripheral line in her before they wheeled her off to the OR, so I bailed about 5 minutes early and just made it to the bathroom in time to throw up again. I haven't eaten all day, just tried to keep the fluids up. I'm debating having some plain boiled rice for dinner, or waiting until tomorrow to have something easy on the stomach. I definitely felt a lot better as the day progressed, but my stomach is still pretty tender. Sarah and I ate pretty much the same stuff yesterday, so I don't think it can be food poisoning. She tends to have a very sensitive stomach at the best of times, so I'd expect her to be showing problems before me if it was food poisoning.
But enough about me, I'll live. I hope it's not a stomach bug, as I don't want Sarah to come down with it as well, now that she's on the road to recovery from this surgery.
Many thanks to Shona, Briana, Laura, and Christina for spending time with me throughout the day to keep me occupied.
ICU visiting hours are every even hour between 10am and 10pm, for thirty minutes at a time, so I plan on spending all day at the hospital tomorrow. Hopefully I can find a good spot to get some EVDO coverage, so I can update things as the day goes along, rather than at the end of the day when I get home, like I had to today.
Hopefully I'll sleep better tonight than I did last night.