Namine is starting to wake up today. She’s not a very happy camper, as the saying goes, but she was awake and lucid enough – before they gave her some morphine for the pain – to tell me, “Get me out of here! Get your little girl out of here!”
The nurse said, “We need to make you feel better first.”
Namine responded with “I feel better already! Get me out of here!”
After the nurse went away, I was able to calm her down enough to have a normal conversation, plus one scratchy little throat (from extubation, you remember). “Do you remember why we came to the hospital?”
“Yeah, so the doctors could fix my heart.”
“Yes, and they did. But now, we have to stay in the hospital so you can get better.”
“Okay. I love you, Daddy.”
Namine’s stats are still looking good. She’s got a fever, which we predicted; her temperature always spikes the day after surgery. They’ll be giving her something for the fever soon – it’s not Tylenol, but as an inflammatory, it will bring her fever down: Ketorolac. They wouldn’t have given it to her yesterday, because one of the side effects is that it decreases platelet efficiency, but the drainage from her chest tubes around her heart and lungs is significantly reduced today. It can also be detrimental to a patient with kidney damage, but again, Namine’s kidney function (yet another thing monitored) is fine. So the doctors have concluded that it should be fine to administer a single dose in order to bring the fever down.
As the day goes on, the plan is to slowly introduce oral liquids back into Namine’s system, starting with mouth swabs (which she hates) and ice chips. As she comes off NPO, if she still has a fever she should be able to take Tylenol by mouth, eliminating the need for alternate medications.
I estimate that Jessica and I got equal amounts of sleep, but that’s not to say that either of us got a whole lot, unfortunately. She’s sleeping on the pull-out bed now; I hope she’s getting better rest now than I did last night. For my part, comfort isn’t really the issue. I got enough sleep to function, and I’ve been grilling the nurses and doctors who come in to see her, prying whatever information I can out of them.
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