Recovery is going well
The first 24 hours after surgery were difficult for Evan and for us. He was not comfortable and not feeling well, It was difficult to see him like that. He was coughing quite a bit and that was really painful. He was on meds for pain but the coughing was definitely too much. I think they give him enough meds to cover nearly all of the pain but not so much to sedate him.
Evan was only in the ICU for about 24 hours before he was moved to the general heart care floor. Since then he has really perked up. He’s certainly not his normal self but he is talking and interacting a lot more. Yesterday the bandage on his incision was removed along with one of three chest tubes, an arterial line in his wrist and an IV in his foot.
Our goals for today and tomorrow are to get him moving a bit more, it would be nice to get him walking around to help get some of the fluids off of his chest. He started eating yesterday and restarted his nighttime tube feeding. He didn’t tolerate the night feeding and hasn’t had a bowel movement yet, so were hoping to see an improvement there over the next day or two. He has a history with chylothorax, so we need to get some fatty food in him and make sure that is not going to be an issue before we would feel comfortable going home. If you recall, chylothorax was the starting point for the massive infection that he had in 2012. That infection caused him to spent an additional 63 days in the hospital that year, we don’t want that to happen again.
Here are a few pictures from the last couple days.
