March 5, 2011 - 1 Day Old

To say that today was an easy day would be lying, but compared to yesterday, it was a piece of cake. The good news is that progress was made. This morning when I arrived at the hospital, I went straight up to the NICU to check on the baby. I knew I would be in the ICU with Amaraa all day, so I thought I should check on the baby before heading to the ICU. When I went into the NICU, the neonatologist was there with the baby. He was just getting ready to do an ultrasound on the heart. During the night, the cardiologist had looked at the heart and had seen that there were some issues. They were seeing some backflow of blood on one of the valves and the pressure within the heart was not what was needed for the valves to shut and seal correctly on each pump of the heart. The good news is that structurally, the heart looked good. They put him on some medicine that made the heart pump harder and said that the problems should resolve with time as the heart muscle strengthens. I watched as the neonatologist did the ultrasound and he pointed out the issues they were seeing. I took some quick photos for Amaraa and then headed down to the ICU.

Amaraa actually looked better than I had expected. She had the breathing tube in her throat and she was sedated, so I just held her hand and sat with her. Her face was still quite swollen, but she was making good progress in getting all of the excess fluid out of her system. The nurse and respiratory specialist said that she needed to get rid of about 8 liters of excess fluid before they felt comfortable removing the breathing tube, and she had already lost 4 liters of that. She was doing great. After I had been there for about an hour or so, they began to wean her off of the sedation and the breathing machine. The only problem was that as they decreased her sedation, the breathing tube became harder to tolerate and she started gagging. Otherwise, though, these were steps in the right direction. They would turn off the machine and let her try to breathe on her own for a period. She was doing really well and was progressing faster than they expected. As the sedation wore off and Amaraa started to wake up more, she started spelling words on the palm of my hand with her finger. Her hands were tied down and she couldn't see what she was doing, so it was difficult to read what she was writing. We got her a pencil and paper and that worked much better. She asked all kinds of questions, mainly about her surgeries, the baby, and all the stuff that was happening to her. Fortunately, she didn't remember much that had happened yesterday.

At around 12:30, the respiratory specialist said they would remove the breathing tube in about an hour. My mom had come up to spend the day with us at the hospital and we thought it would be a good time for us to go to lunch so we could be back for when the tube was removed and Amaraa was fully awake. We ran to lunch and were nearly done when the nurse called and said they were going to remove the tube. Amaraa had asked the nurse to call me before they did it. We finished eating and headed back to the hospital. When we got to Amaraa's room, the breathing tube was gone. She looked great. We were able to give her ice chips and a few sips of water.

In the afternoon, she started having pretty severe back pain. They put some pillows behind her back and adjusted her position in the bed. Adjusting her in the bed caused her a lot of pain. She had slipped down on the draw sheet so that only the top half of her body was on top of it, so as they pulled the draw sheet up, her top half moved and her bottom half wanted to stay where it was. It was very painful for her. On top of that, she was still having the terrible back pain. It felt like the pain was in her kidneys, so they ran some tests to check for infection and ordered an ultrasound of her kidneys. Because the epidural was just wearing off (they give emergency c-section patients a longer-lasting dose of epidural medication), they figured that the pain was just hitting her from that, but they also ordered a CT scan to check for internal bleeding. Amaraa was really nervous about the CT scan because they had to move her from her bed onto the CT scanner table and then back again. After the pain she had experienced when they moved her before, she didn't want to be moved at all. Because of all of the bleeding problems yesterday, I knew it was particularly important for her to have the scan, so I talked to her and convinced her to go through with it. She agreed as long as I was with her the whole time and promised I would make sure they were gentle with her.

This afternoon, I told her about all that had happened yesterday, including the fact that we had almost lost her a couple of times. I showed her pictures and videos of the baby I had taken yesterday and she was so happy that he was OK. I asked her what she wanted to name the baby. I thought she had earned the right to make that decision. :-) The name she chose is Aiden Temuujin Torgerson. That works for me.

We wheeled her down to radiology for the scan. She had some pain as we moved her over onto the scanning table, but we were very careful and made sure we caused as little pain as possible. She made it through the scan OK and we transferred her back onto the bed. We wheeled her back to her room and they got her ready for bed. The CT scan results came back and they showed there wasn't any internal bleeding. They did see some inflammation of the membranes around her kidneys and other organs due to all the bleeding she had yesterday. That was what was causing her severe back pain. Amaraa asked me to go up to the NICU and take some pictures and video of the baby and then bring them back and show them to her. He was still doing well -- about the same as this morning. I took the photos and video Amaraa had asked me to take and then, according to Mongolian tradition, I whispered the baby's new name in his ear three times. I headed back and showed the pictures and videos to Amaraa. She cried. They were able to get Amaraa's pain under control and she actually felt like sleeping. It was 10:00 PM, so I decided to leave and let her sleep.

I read her yesterday's blog post and she wanted me to make sure that I added a few things:

Just before Amaraa started bleeding yesterday, one of our good friends, Choka Walker, came to visit and brought Amaraa some good Mongolian food. She was just getting ready to eat it and was so excited because it was hot and looked so "beautiful". Just then, she felt a gush of blood and thought she would head to the bathroom to change her pad before digging into her lunch. The bleeding was so bad that it gushed out all over the floor of the bathroom and she had to call the nurse in. That was when Dr. Anderson ordered her c-section. Amaraa was so disappointed that she couldn't eat the beautiful food Choka had brought. I made a few other minor edits to yesterday's post, but that was the main thing Amaraa wanted me to add.

Another tiring day. I know the photo isn't very flattering, but this is the one Amaraa wanted me to post. The picture is of her before they removed the breathing tube.