Moving on up

Well, we caught another break yesterday. Cardiology did a follow-up echo of her heart function and they said it clearly looks better! It's still pretty bad but an improvement is a positive sign. And it's not only better than Friday's echo (day after surgery showed WORSE function), it's better than her echo BEFORE surgery as well. Dr Schneider said he just wanted to get her back to the function she was at before we got here, but she's already exceeded that! Also, her BNP (measure of heart failure...some take more stock in it than others) was 3200 when we came in, 15,000 after surgery and now is 2500. The numbers don't matter as much as the trend does. And she's trending better! Finally!

Brian and I are actually quite scared to even share this news, because whenever we feel happy about something this little girl throws us a loop. So let's just say yesterday was a good day and hopefully today and tomorrow will be a good day.

In the irony department, I walked outside of Molly's room to have a breakdown about how horrible everything was going. While I was crying in the hallway to Rebecca (she has amazing timing because the doors opened to the PICU next to me with her on the other side right as I was losing it. Bad for her, good for me), they came and did the echo and we got the good news. We've dealt with things turning for the worse in such a short amount of time, so I guess we were due for the opposite at some point.

So cardiology is "cautiously optimistic". Today they are adding back her enalipril to her daily medications to make sure she tolerates it fine. They are keeping her on her heavy diuretics for another 24 hours then will begin to wean her back to her home dose of lasix. And they are going to up her carvedilol. All these things shouldn't take much time. The time consuming one could be weaning her off the milrinone. My guess is they want to do it slow because that's how they work. HOW slow is yet to be answered as we're still waiting to talk to them today. This morning I would have said a few days, but at rounds this morning a fellow casually suggested that her improvement was because of the milrinone and not the new pacer. This made me nervous that that is what cardio thinks too and that they will wean her really slow (and of course it made me nervous that he could be right too and this is a false positive). We'll see what they say today... or Molly could just boff her central line again and force cardiology to pull the milrnone plug...she is so bossy with these docs.

Word is we're also moving to the floor today. This is good in that it means they consider Molly to not need intensive care. Bad in that we go back to sharing a room and sleeping on a recliner chair. We might get a reprieve if they don't have a room for us.