An Update

Here is a clip from Pete's update of Sariah;
"I'll try to summarize everything from today. It seems more like a week. I'll just cut to the important stuff and fill in details later. As we have known from the start, Sariah is full of surprises. Most importantly, she is currently through her surgery and doing very well. As far as details, we were hoping to have a VSD (hole between the heart chambers) patched which would kind of make her heart have 4 chambers again and resemble a normal one. Unfortunately the muscles that attach to two of her heart valves are tethered to the bottom of the hole and a patch was not possible. Also, her pulmonary arteries were a little smaller than expected. So, the surgeon placed a shunt from her aorta to her pulmonary artery, which would improve her oxygen levels and grow the pulmonary artery over time. As she was coming off the heart lung machine, things did not look right and a clot had formed in the shunt. She had to go back on the heart lung machine, have her shunt taken down, and have a goretex conduit placed from the right ventricle to pulmonary artery. This seemed to work well and she was able to come off the heart lung machine again. She had some swelling around her heart and so still has an open wound. This is not uncommon after a 7 hr surgery we are told. Liz has been proudly telling everyone that she has now seen Sariah's heart. Everyone feels like she is doing remarkably well so far given the extent of her surgery. We are very happy to have her doing so well. Despite her hard day when we saw her she still looked like the same little doll that I took to the OR this morning and seems to be enduring all of this with her typical Sariah spunk (she was even fighting the ventilator and wanting to move around despite all she's gone through). There will still be many hurtles to get through this surgery so we will be praying hard and appreciate everyone's support and faith on her behalf.