Post Surgery Day 4

Ellie has been doing well with the sedation and medications that they are giving her to help alleviate her pulmonary hypertension.  Unfortunately today there was another alarming moment when her chest tube started draining quite alot of bright red blood.  The doctors seem to think that one of her blood vessels "popped off" and it is quite uncommon to see bleeding like this 4 days after surgery.  One of the factors could also be that she has been moving a little more, so they have sedated her and put her on a paralytic again.  Another factor could be due to some of the medications that she has started, mainly the nitric oxide and suldinifide, that may have lowered her platelet levels.  So they are giving her extra platelets, letting her rest without moving, putting more pressure on her venilator, and hopefully that will give whatever was bleeding a chance to clot.  If not, she will be back in the OR so they can cauterize and at the same time they will place pacer wires just so they won't have to go in a third time if she does end up needing a pacemaker.  Other than her unexpected bleeding today, Ellie has tolerated everything else very well.  They have been able to wean her off her nitric oxide and within the next few days hopefully she will be off of it completely.  The amount of IVs that are running through her are up to 8-10 now from 4-6.  Good thing that is not an indicator of how well she is doing.