Once at Lankenau Medical Center, it took them a few hours to get my settled into my room in the CTICU because I had so many machines attached to me.
July 18th
Around 3am the next morning, my Cardiologist came to speak to Steve and my mom. ECMO was keeping me oxygenated, and therefore alive, but they were having trouble getting my heart to start pumping strong enough again. They had already tried a few different drugs with no success. They told my family that they were going to try an Impella Device. They basically insert a tiny windmill-like device into your femoral artery up into your heart. The hope is that it will expel the blood from the left ventricle and allow the heart to start pumping strongly again. The doctors were clear that this was pretty much a last ditch effort. If this didn’t work my heart would clot and I wouldn’t make it.
Thankfully, it worked! After the Impella Device was inserted, I was taken to the OR again for another exploratory laparotomy and abdominal washout. They cleaned up the abdominal area, re-stiched some previous incisions, and re-packed me. They, again, left me partially open so they could go back in. The idea was to continue going back in to make sure the bleeding was still slowed and to clean the area since my stat c-section was unable to be done under the most sterile of conditions. At this point my neurological functioning was still TBD. They were attempting to keep my temperature down to heed off any neurological complications, but they needed to start warming me back up so my heart and clotting would hopefully return to normal.
Later that day, my team updated my family to let them know that my heart was starting to eject and that they felt like the Impella was working. The goal was to give me time to rest and they would run a few tests to check on any possible heart damage as well as brain activity.
The best moment of the day: Cal was transferred from Paoli to be with me. We met for the first time, even though I was unconscious.
That night, I opened my eyes, felt all of my tubes, and also moved my leg.
July 19th
The next morning, I was brought into the OR for another exploratory laparotomy and abdominal washout. Again, they cleaned up the abdominal area, re-stiched some previous incisions, and re-packed me. They were able to close me a little more this time, but still left the incision partially open to go back in the next day.
My heart was finally doing it’s job again and looked great. They were hoping to downgrade my ECMO support to just lungs. When they took me back to test the functioning with the ECMO support clamped off, they realized my lungs were doing pretty well with just the vent, so they were able to take me completely off of ECMO just 2 days after the support had been initiated. They originally thought I would be on ECMO for a week or two.
