Ballooning Big Day Aftermath

Teddy is home and happy to be here. They've cut the pressure differential in half, which means it's dropped from severe to the upper bound of moderate, while keeping the leaking to mild to moderate (up from mild). We're hoping for this to be the only surgery he needs for the next 1 or 2 years. It was a much less invasive procedure than the open heart surgeries are. After the operation, we did not code, which is nice. After every other surgery, I've had to come back and let people know about some terrible moment after the surgery. This time, the "terrible" was that he had 4 heartbeats overnight in recovery that were afib (originating somewhere that they weren't supposed to in the heart). This is very common for heart kids, especially after someone pokes around inside their heart. He is wearing a heart monitor at home for the rest of the morning, and we'll be mailing that back today. The difference in recovery from this vs. the open heart is amazing to me. He was not intubated. He was up and at em again the next morning. All in all, much, much easier.

Below, I've attached some of the pictures of his heart during the operation. These are all side view, with the front of Teddy's chest on the left, his spine on the right.

1. Top Left: Teddy's heart at the start. The dark bit at the top is his aorta. The darkness of it vs. his heart below shows the pressure difference. Dark there is bad.
2. Top Right: Measurements of the valve and chambers of his heart and his aorta. You can see the catheter snaking up through the candy cane shaped aorta from below.
3. Middle Left: Teddy's heart with the 10mm balloon stretching the valve open. The balloon is the grey oval in the middle. They fill it with saline and contrast dye because having air in your arteries is a bad idea.
4. Middle Right: Teddy's heart with the 12mm balloon.
5. Bottom Left: Teddy's heart with the 14mm balloon inside. This one they didn't fill as full.
6. Bottom Right: Teddy's heart after. You can see that the aorta on top is not as dark relative to the heart below. This is what we wanted to see. The pressure is more even which is what we needed to have happen.