Cori Lou is heading out to California in two days to prepare for heart surgery. A couple of weeks ago, she started having a lot more trouble breathing again and still hasn’t been gaining much weight, so she needs the VSD (the doctors found it soon after she was born, as you can read here) patched sooner than anticipated.
The cardiac pediatric specialist (the one here in town that has been seeing Cori) has scheduled her for surgery on Dec 6th. However, the surgery is not done here in the Boise area. The closest options were Salt Lake, UT and Stanford, CA. Heidi has some family fairly close (about 1.5 hours drive in good traffic) to Stanford, so California was first choice.
Cori and her parents are flying out to California on December 3rd, so that they can be there in time for pre-op procedures. They have been told to expect Cori to be in the hospital for a minimum of 5-6 days. They have tentatively arranged to fly home Dec 17th, but really don’t know what to expect on that side of surgery.
Living accommodations for Cori’s mom and dad during this time are not settled. They need to be close because they have already experienced the need to be available for decisions, as well as feeding (Heidi will be continuing the work of pumping her milk regularly through all of this), and cuddling. Rich will also be needing to attend to job responsibilities remotely via the internet.
The Stanford Guest House is available to them for a couple of nights, basically until Cori is admitted. They will stay with Heidi’s Grandma the first night they arrive in the area, though. After that, it is unfortunately too far away. They are also hoping that the Ronald McDonald House will have room for at least Rich. Cori will stay in the cardiac ICU right out of surgery. From there, she will at some point be transferred to another cardiac care unit. Heidi will have the option of staying somewhere in the hospital with either location for Cori Lou. There are some kitchenette and laundry services available there, too. Communication will be complicated by the fact that cell phones are not permitted in the hospital.
Cori’s abdominal surgery site looked very smooth when this photo was taken 11 days ago, so there is reasonable hope that her scars from the heart surgery will heal nicely, too. (click on any photo to enlarge)
Here are two photos of Cori from this Thanksgiving Day weekend. You can see watching all those people eat was exhausting. But when she is awake, she looks like she is saying, “Let’s get this show on the road!”
