Sunday 19th May - Day 4

I have had a very quiet night with my nurse Siji, and this morning the surgeons came to see me and have decided to close my chest, which means my little "My Chest is Open" sticker will be taken away. Just to give my mummy and daddy a bit more stress I have been dropping my saturation levels a bit this morning before the operation, it's just what I do! My nurse Antonia has set my bed space up as a mini operating theatre, there are lots of nurses all dressed up with hats and masks and all the visitors and parents have been asked to leave intensive care for a couple of hours. The surgeons have checked me out inside and say everything is looking ok, and they have put my chest bones and ribs back together with special wires and sewn my chest back together. They say I have tolerated it well. So after 4 days my operation is now complete! I have had a new larger diameter pulmonary conduit fitted to the right side of my heart, I have had my pulmonary arteries enlarged from my left lung to my right lung using a special patch which has been stitched into my own arteries and then connected to the conduit. I have had my VSD (hole in my heart) closed with a patch, which they have had to put a little hole back into because my pulmonary pressures were too high and they have made a new hole (an ASD) to help with balancing the pressures between the left and right side of my heart. I had to go back onto the bypass machine on Thursday evening because my arteries were bleeding lots and the pressures were too high, so the surgeons fitted a wrap to my left artery where it meets my lungs to help and put me a new hole in my heart to balance the pressures, in their words "It was technically challenging". There was even a surgeon who came from London to help for the day! I saw one of the nurses (yes Claire) last night and she was telling me that I had made her work very hard on Thursday night and she was very tired on Friday, but that's what I do!! My nurse has also put my ventilator down my nose (it was in my mouth before) and changed all my bedding, I now have a "Dora the Explorer" pink bed sheet to lie on, nice. I have now got to be a good girl before the doctors start to make me do some work for myself as they will be starting to reduce my dependency on the machines, but only very gently!!