Thursday Morning

We made it through the worst of it, I hope. They let us come in and see David at about 10:00 last night. That was really hard, it's always quite a shock. He was having shivers due to coming out of the anesthesia so his whole body shook quite a bit. He also was having trouble with nausea and was in a lot of pain. He would talk to us, but kept his eyes closed most of the time. He said when he opened his eyes he was seeing double. David's blood pressure was pretty high when he came out and so they gave him medicine to fix it and by about 2 am it was back to normal. He had a chest x-ray last night and then again this morning. We asked the nurse and he said the x-ray is looking for fluid collecting around his heart. He was pretty miserable most of the night. By about 3am they finally had given enough pain medication that David was able to sleep. He says that he feels ok, he feels like he isn't sick, just in a lot of pain. He says it feels like somebody opened up his chest, go figure. Through the night he asked a lot of questions, he wanted to know how long the surgery took, he wanted to know how it went and if he had any chest tubes (he has 2). He also wanted to know if I'd gotten anything to eat. He's always worried about everyone else. He wanted us to hold his hand, and at one point he even asked me to give him a kiss. Normally he would have Sydney do it, but I guess I had to do because she's not here.

Right now David is sleeping peacefully. He wanted the oxygen off but they won't let him because it always dips too low. The plan is to move him to a regular room later today, and then the chest tubes should come out tomorrow. That's how things move in the hospital, he loses one tube at a time. His pace maker has been kicking in, it works when his heart rate drops below 60. All through the night his heart rate was around 100, but now is at 60 and the monitor says it is being paced. Even though this will be a long process, things are moving in the right direction and we are thankful that everything went well.