Surgery Update #4

2:00 - The nurse and our cardiologist just came back out.  The reason the surgery is taking longer than expected is that they were seeing some issueswhen they tried to bring Carson off of the heart / lung machine.  

To go into a little bit more detail, after Carson's heart was pumping again on its own, the surgeon was not pleased with the pump motion and they were still seeing a little bit of leaking in one of the valves.  From there, they put him back on the heart / lung machine so they could clean up the valve.  After this cleanup was complete, there were issues with getting Carson off the machine the second time.  To help ease this transition, they will be placing him on an ECMO (Extra Corporeal Membrane Oxygenation) machine that can slowly decrease magnitude of the heart / lung bypass while slowly increasing the amount of work that his heart is doing.  The best estimate at the time is that he will remain on this ECMO machine for 24-48 hours until his heart healed enough to carry the full load.  

A byproduct of the events above is that the surgeon will not be closing the incision in his chest until he is off of the ECMO machine.  This will certainly take some getting used to, but it will allow continued access to Carson's heart while we are waiting for confirmation is is healing the way is should.

Thank you all again for your continued prayers.

(Written by Charles)