Cardio Report

Peeper saw her cardiologist again today, and he's still very happy with how she's doing.

Her echo showed that her heart function is still great, and there is no accumulation of fluid around her heart.

He also said that "she looks like a different kid," and that she's "breathing normally," which is a big change from before surgery.

When I asked for some numbers, to put it in perspective, he said that he did not actually count her respirations today, but "eyeballing it" he'd say she was breathing 25 - 35 times per minute, and that before surgery, her respiration rate was in the 60s.

In other words, she was breathing twice as fast as she should.

And now she's not.

Amazing.

He said her incision is still looking good, and snipped the little stitch on the incision where her drain tube was. The suture didn't actually all come out, but it should be able to fall out on its own now.

He also reminded us (I'd forgotten they told us this at the hospital) that her main incision has a lot of internal stitches under the dermabond, and some of them way work their way out through in the incision.

He said that it's okay to just gently pull them, and snip them off short.

He also told us that we "might get an inch or two."

I thanked him for warning us about that, because I would have totally thought she was coming unravelled, like a sweater!

(He said it freaked him out the first time, too!)

It seems like there might be a tiny bit of a suture peeking out at the very bottom end of her incision. It's kind of creeping me out.

He told us to drop her Captopril (blood pressure medication) back to once daily for a week, and then she can stop taking it!

(Actually, it's a week or until we run out, whichever comes sooner. We have just a tiny amount left, and he said not to bother refilling.)

We'll go back in two weeks, and if he's still happy with everything, he'll take her off the Lasix (which she'll continue to take once a day until then), and start spreading out the visits further and further apart.

And, I'm not putting this in the sidebar, because I really don't believe it, given the variability that we've seen from their scales, but they claim that she weighed 11 lb 7 oz!