had a few great visits with Noah this weekend. He was mostly awake and alert while I was with him and his nurse had dressed him up for the first time since the transplant. The nurse had him sitting up an he was looking all around - eyes following people that walk by and what not. Sometime during the night, though, they noticed that he wasn’t breathing all that great. Part of his right lung has collapsed because he has been laying down so much. So, they put him back on the ventilator today. Also, he’s gotten puffy again and is having trouble urinating.Noah was scheduled to have his first heart catheterization/biopsy (heart cath) today, but they’re making him wait until tomorrow to make sure that he doesn’t have an infection coming on. I guess, his labs showed that his white blood cells were a little off. I didn’t know what exactly a heart cath was until Maria just explained it to me. I just knew it was a diagnostic procedure during which he could move. Therefore they would need to put him on the ventilator and sedate him (he’s already sedated and on the ventilator).
The heart cath is a procedure used to determine whether the body is rejecting the new heart. Noah will have to have the procedure more frequently immediately following the transplant and less frequently as time goes on. For the heart cath, a tube will be inserted into Noah’s groin and run through a vein to his heart where it will extract three small tissue samples. I think the tube will also be equipped with a camera. It’s an all day event because they’ll have to watch him to make sure that there’s no bleeding/infection incurred during the procedure. It will continue to be an all day event as he needs them in the future, but they say kids are generally back to their normal selves on the following day.
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