Last night went well. I had gone up to the unit during the day to give them lunch relief and to take some pictures of our patients. When I went up I heard that the patient in the OR, Hillary-a 19 year old boy-was having a hard time in surgery. He was not a mitral valve replacement...he had a place right by his aortic valve that was bulging that they were to remove. The tricky part about this is your coronaries, that feed your heart muscle, lie in the spot they were to remove, so they had to mess around with those, first, one wasn't long enough to stretch when they removed the portion of the aorta, then they think part of it kinked...basically the patient had a lot of arrhythmias and time where the heart muscle wasn't getting good oxygen supply which can permanently damage your heart. Everyone was very concerned. They ended up taking a piece of blood vessel from the leg to bypass this coronary, so the procedure was long-he was in the OR around 11 hours. This was the scene we walked into last night.
Since that case was taking so long, Russ (the Tenwek surgeon) went ahead and did the mitral valve replacement on his own in the second room, so both patients came out right around 645 pm.
The valve replacement, Sabina, did well. And Hillary had a great night, woke up, was asking for his breathing tube to come out, came off blood pressure medicines and by the morning we took his breathing tube out! In many ways a miracle. I think he will still be slower to leave the hospital but all in all he is doing better than he should be!
We worked with Cynthia and Aaron in the ICU last night...neither is normally in the recovery or ICU for that matter, but they are catching on fairly well. They can do all the steps right, they just don't always put the pieces together in terms of I am seeing this, I should tell the doctor or I should think about doing this...this is one of the pieces that is really hard to teach because I think it is a cultural thing...something they have never been taught to do.
It is crazy it is already Friday and that some of our team leaves tomorrow!! It flies by here once we get going! There will be 4 of us left here to man the ICU but hopefully all of these patients today will do well.
In the midst of all this busy-ness and spending so much time and effort teaching I feel weary in my brain by the end of a 12 hour shift. But being here with such a strong group has been encouraging and seeing moments of breakthrough has been encouraging. Glad I am here with others who continue to remind and encourage me in what we are doing...Hebrews 3:13 But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called “Today,” so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness.
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| Lillian, all smiles! |
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| Nightshift crew |
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