preparing for surgery

For the past few months we have been anticipating Kelly's heart surgery. We have been waiting and knowing it was coming. And now that day is upon us. Today we were up bright and early ready to head off to all of Kelly's appointments. I usually dread this day, almost more than surgery. It is a long day with lots going on. Today, however, could not have gone better! Kelly was amazing, seriously she did great! And our doctor moved all of our appointments to pretty much the same time, so we were done with everything much earlier than we would have been, which was so nice for us.
The only hard part was the first thing of the day. Kelly had to have her blood drawn and it was hard and oh how she cried. Girlfriend does not have good veins, they had a hard time finding one that was going to work. When they finally tried Kelly wiggled and moved the needle just enough that they lost it. So we had to switch arms, she was not happy again. This mom felt horrible for her baby girl. She quickly recovered and was then a champ the rest of the day! It is hard to see in this picture but she looked pretty tough with both her arms wrapped up. Those white things on her arms are not sleeves to her shirt!

 After a blood draw and a chest x-ray it was time for an echo. The plan was to sedate Kelly for the echo so that she would sleep. Because she was going to be sedated she had not eaten since 5:30 this morning. It was about 10:00 by the time we were getting for the echo. We had to wait a while, we were waiting for a doctor to come before the nurse could give her the sedation meds. While we waited Kelly girl fell asleep. So the nurse quickly grabbed the tech doing the echo and I just held Kelly while the lady did her thing. It worked out so well! I hate having my kids sedated, it makes them funky the rest of the day. Kelly slept the whole time the lady worked, she did amazing! After she woke up we gave her a bottle and she was so happy! And we were happy we never had to give her the icky medicine to sedate her. She had to have an ECG after her echo and does she not look so cute- she was smiling at the nurse the whole time. Look at this cute baby being such a good girl!

All is set for surgery tomorrow morning. We check in at 6 in the morning, it will take about two hours to prep Kelly for surgery and then surgery will take about three hours. We will try to update throughout the day tomorrow. Thanks to everyone for praying for our sweet girl. As I was holding Kelly today during her echo I just kept thanking God for the people who were praying for her, I know that today Kelly did so great because her Heavenly Father was holding her!