We are currently still in the hospital with Declan, and it has been an emotional past 48 hours. He was transferred to the heart center on Saturday morning, which we were really excited about. He was doing great as far as pain and alerness, and there were no negative side effects from the surgery. He had also started eating well, and was eating more than he normally did before the surgery, which was a huge excitement.
Late Saturday morning, however, he had a hard time keeping down his milk. He started spitting up a neon yellow color substance and seemed like he was having stomach troubles. They suspected horrible acid reflux, so we stopped feeding and put him on an IV to give medicine time to kick in. Sunday afternoon, he was able to take a bit of Pedialyte and then later we tried feeding again a little bit of milk. As he was taking that, he spit up more of the neon yellow and continued to do this, so it was back to the IV with a consult in to the doctors. They did know that this was not something related to the surgery, although it could be a strange effect from a medicine.
Overnight Sunday he started spitting up bright green fluid, and the nurses assured us they would make sure we had answers for the problems as soon as the doctors could look at him. He had an upper GI test done Monday and this showed some sort of blockage in the intestine, but they weren't sure what. The radiologist suspected a narrowing that they may have to go in and open up, but nothing serious. The next thing we knew, however, a couple of people from the surgical team came to talk to us and let us know that Declan would be going in for emergency intestinal surgery within the hour because the green fluid was a very bad sign. No one has ever mentioned anything wrong with the intestines, so this was quite a shock to us and was difficult emotionally since we already had so many other things to worry about, not to mention fear of problems of having a major surgery only four days after heart surgery.
The surgery itself took about three hours, and it turned out that he had malformed intestines--this means they began twisting around each other so food cannot get through (it's pretty much like when a garden hose gets wadded up and kinked in several places). So they had to manually take it out and unwind it. Definitely not a pleasant thought!
At this point we are back in ICU, but we should be able to head back up to the heart center this afternoon if all continues to go well. We're looking at another possible 5-7 days in the hospital, so it will be another long week for us. Right now we are so extremely thankful and blessed that problems happened when they did. This was totally unrelated to the heart surgery, and he just so happened to have the problems while we were still here but had already recovered mostly from the first surgery. Had it gone on much longer, his intestines would have started dying off and we would be dealing with some major permanent damage. So while we really wish we didn't have to deal with two major surgeries back-to-back, we're so very glad we have answers and a fix for the problems he was having over the weekend. We're just hoping this is Declan's last surgery for a long time! Oh, and while they were at it, they also took his appendix out--it wasn't causing problems, but because of the malformation it ends up in the wrong spot of the body so if he were to have problems with it later in life, he would probably be misdiagnosed. Too bad they couldn't go ahead and take out any other potential unnecessary problem organs!
