Updates on Havalah

By: Steve Kolb Date/Time: 8/3/2005 1:52:09 AM Update: Havalah got "the call" tonight at 8:30pm on Tuesday night. Kristen and Havalah were up in green bay so they had to drive back to milwaukee right away. Currently it is around 1:45am on wednesday morning. There are several of us sitting in the waiting room since there is a limit of 4 people in the ICU room. My parents are here and Kristen's mom, step-dad, brother and aunt... as well as another friend of ours. We were told a short time ago that the liver is good and that the surgery is going to start sometime around 4am. I'm fairly calm at this point, I haven't really spazzed out yet besides the flurry of phone calls and emails + packing I had to do between 8:30 and 10:30 (when i arrived at childrens hospital). Kinda sleepy, but I doubt I will sleep. Havalah was extremely upset when we got here and screamed in the ICU room for at least an hour before she was decently calmed down. She generally gets upset once she sees medical staff because she has been poked and proded on at least a bi-weekly basis since she has been born. I don't blame her for freaking out when there are like 6-8 nurses crowded around you trying to get an IV in your arm and take x-rays etc... but now she is sleeping on kristen's lap in the ICU room so things have quiete down quite a bit. I guess I don't have much more to add at this point so I'm signing off for now...   By: Steve Date/Time: 8/3/2005 7:41:29 AM Update: Wed morning time 7:40am. There were some complications in removing the heart from the donor patient in chicago, so the surgery has been delayed (the liver is taken out of a body after the heart). I was just told that they are going to be bringing her into surgery pretty soon.   By: Kristen Date/Time: 8/3/2005 9:01:45 AM Update: They did bring Havalah in shortly after Steve posted. She was very sleepy and they gave her versed which made her look drugged. She managed to half smile at me a couple of times. Noone has come in to talk to us yet, but they will let us know when surgery starts. When they brought her in I don't think the liver was here yet, but they wanted to get ready and have all of the lines they needed placed. Please pray for Havalah, and also please pray for the donor's family. We have no info aside from that the liver came from Chicago, but I do know they were only going to accept a pediatric donor, so i am assuming it was a child. We had a long night of trying to get Havalah to sleep. We both only slept a little, The portable dvd player she got with birthday money came in very handy to calm her down. We have access to a computer in the waiting room, so we will be doing updates here throughtout the day. Unfortunately I cannot log on to classkids because i don't have my password, and i tried to fill out a new registration but they send the passwd to email which i can't access. I *can* read on classkids though. I would appreciate it if someone cut and paste our posts and updates from here under "our kids" to let more people know what is happening. i know a lot of people don't check "who's who" regularly. Thanks, Kristen   By: Steve Date/Time: 8/3/2005 10:01:41 AM Update: 10am... no updates to report... they have not came and talked to us since Havalah was taken into prep for surgery so we have no idea whats going on.   By: Steve Date/Time: 8/3/2005 10:38:22 AM Update: Well someone finally came and talked to us a few minutes ago. Havalah is doing fine right now and her liver has been removed. Kristen went into the surgery area and took a photograph of her old liver. it looks pretty enlarged and red/purple. Anyhow, her new liver still needs to be put into her body but there is a lot of work that needs to be done with vein connections etc before that can be accomplished. so far so good. we should have an update in another 2 hours or so.   Next >>

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