Resilience

I'm writing this staring at my little Cora Lionheart, beautiful strong warrior, who made it through yet another challenge today.

First let me say she is stable now.

About six hours after she initially went down for surgery, she came back to our familiar home on 7 East, the Pediatric Cardiac ICU. As we feared, Cora had a rougher go of things and her heart arrested four times during the procedure, requiring them to use the defibrillator each time.

My heart sunk about six floors upon hearing those words from the surgeon.

Other than that (!) it went okay.

This girl. I swear.

The electrophysiologist explained that her heart has just been so sick that it is very sensitive. It doesn't want anyone messing with it, screwing things into it, sewing things onto it, or anything else. But the good news now is that she has the pacemaker in place and everything is working as it should. There won't be any more arresting.

Jason and I looked at the x-ray of her chest and abdomen and it is just full of equipment. We can't see the pacemaker generator in her belly from the outside yet (because she is very swollen) but once she gets back to normal it will be very obvious.

In the ICU they were able to get the breathing tube out, which is great. Cora hates that thing and is so very uncomfortable when it's in. Other than the trauma of pulling it and her extreme dislike of that process, she has been calm for the most part. She just woke up a little bit ago in pain, but she got more meds and is right now resting with her elephant binky.

Sweet beautiful girl. The holes she has been able to climb out of have been enormous and deep and countless, but no matter what, she just keeps right on climbing. Still, the last nearly six months have been, well, in a word, f'ed.

Here's hoping this is the bottom, and that the road from here is up and leads to a nice little yellow house in San Rafael.