"Day Two Downers" be damned, Sarah's powering along like a freight train.
Neither of us had a terribly fantastic night's sleep. Her chest drain is attached to this big box thing that has some sort of water seal in it, and with the suction going through it, it bubbles and makes noise like a massive aquarium. But she did get some sleep, and said she felt better this morning for it.
The doctor came by at 8am, and took the incision dressing off, and we got our first good look at it. It's big (i.e. long). It runs from about the top of her breastbone to the bottom of her sternum. 20cm at my estimation. She said that she thought the chest tube could come out today, and sure enough it came out at about 12:30pm. They also took her urinary catheter out at that time, so now all she's hooked up to is oxygen. Her blood sugar levels were acceptable at breakfast time.
Oh, the reason the incision ran so high was because they elected to do the bypass attachment to an artery in her neck, rather than further around the aorta, because the tissue was fragile and they didn't want to risk a dissection. Not doing the bypass in the aorta also left them the option of removing some of the transcending arch if they determined it still ended up being necessary.
Sarah got up and had breakfast in a chair again, and was generally feeling pretty mobile. She moved between the chair and a wheelchair (and back) when they came to get her for another x-ray, without requiring any assistance.
She took her first walk around the ward at 11am. I'd popped home for a shower and to check on the cats, and so I missed it.
Doctor Miller dropped in at around 12:30pm to see how she was doing, and that was good as Sarah got a chance to talk directly to him about how the procedure had gone. He was very positive and said she could put this whole thing behind her now.
At 2pm, she went for another walk, this time sans two thirds of the tubes from her first walk, and got in and out of bed unassisted.
She took her last walk of the day at 4pm.
Apparently her blood sugar is still on the high side, but within the range that they don't feel the need to give her insulin. Her chest is apparently looking better on the x-ray they took this morning. They took a second one after they removed the chest drain, but we haven't heard anything about how that looks yet.
She's continuing to do extremely well, most of this less than 48 hours out of surgery.