Alexis Surgery Updates

Tuesday morning, Alexis embarked on her 7th surgery of her life. This surgery was scheduled to fix her heart defects.

The plan was to arrive at 7:30am and go to CT at 8:30am. That plan was derailed for no known cause. Alexis entertained herself during the delay with some toys. See exhibits A and B.

There was a lot of time in the morning to watch “hospital time”. (this is the time where the clocks move forward but nothing happens in reality – maybe I should call it Time Warp).  
After Alexis exhausted her selection of toys, she upgraded to Steve’s iPad. She loved it. She was coloring and drawing and putting on stickers that made sounds and having an awesome time. She even wrote her name! (Just kidding, she had some assistance!)

Then at 11am, they gave her some Versed and took her to be intubated. She then went to CT scan to confirm a question that her orthopedic doctor had (a small concern – ha ha! He was hoping to confirm that Alexis’ skull was safely adhered to her spine). Alexis has fusions between C2 and C4 of her cervical spine (neck) and they were concerned that the neck to the head wasn’t securely attached. We’ll tease her later about not having her head screwed on.


And then at probably 12:30pm, they were ready to start the 2-3 hour heart defect repair procedure. About 1 hour into the procedure, Alexis’ catheterization surgeon came out to talk to us. The doctor explained that her ASD (whole in the heart) isn’t as easy to close as he hoped it would be. He found that her HOLE is like swiss cheese – with many holes instead of 1 big hole. He wasn’t sure at that time if he would be able to close it with a device inserted through a catheter or whether he would need to do open heart surgery to repair it. We told him we’d like for him to try to close it with the device since that was the least invasive and impactful for Alexis. In the end, he was successful in closing most of the hole, but there is a 3mm defect still remaining. Hopefully that will get smaller as she gets bigger. 

Alexis stayed overnight in the ICU.  We get our own private room and lots of equipment to make sure she has a restful night (and safe!).


We were reminded again today, Alexis does not pick the “easy/straightforward” route, she likes the routes that cause doctors to think and work hard!