Although today has not gone quite as smooth as we would have liked for the day after surgery, Audrey is doing great right now and recovering from the surgery itself pretty well. She is laying there in and out of sleep, watching some cartoons on the tv, and she keeps kicking her right leg constantly.
She now has an ICD (implantable cardioverter defibrillator ) which will protect her if she has an cardiac event in the future as she had last Monday, but the ICD does not offer anything to prevent such events from happening that she did not already have with her pacemaker. The goal now is to try to ensure that she does not have any more events and does not have to use the ICD as anything more than a pacer.
We went into today hoping that her rhythms would return to a stable sinus rhythm once again and we would be out of CICU on Saturday and over in stepdown for a couple of days. This morning Audrey had multiple bouts of short runs of tachycardia that would go away after a few seconds. Since she is still a little sedated and not yet drinking or eating anything, the doctors suspect that she is not absorbing the oral medicines that were given so they started up the IV form of the anti-arythmic drug along with continuing the oral meds as well and set her pacing settings a little differently and at a much higher rate. Once stable and confident that she is absorbing the oral medicine then we'll back off of the IV medication and slow back down the pacer rate while watching how she responds. This means we are going to be in the CICU for at least a few more days before going over to step-down.
Our hope is that tomorrow Audrey will possibly get her surgery drain tubes removed, her incisions continue to heal ok, and her heart rate continues to remain stable as she comes back down after all of the jarring of the surgery.
Audrey definitely appreciated all of the well wishes.
- Mark
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