Mason's first 24 hours

As one nurse told us "Mason set the record for most excitement in his first 24 hours after he was born."

Immediately after he was born, the doctors rushed him into another room to start the care for him. Now that he was "on his own" he needed to breathe on his own, however the CDH condition that he had would not allow him to do so sufficiently. Once they got him in the room and started working on him, I was allowed to come into the room with him while the c-section doctors finished finding the balloon's inside of Rosie. There were about 10-12 doctors working on Mason. As we expected, the doctors were not able to maintain his vital signs with the use of a ventalator. After a short time (not sure how long because everything was happening so fast, but probably about 15 minutes), the doctors took him down the hall to start the surgical procedure to put him on ECMO, the heart & lung bypass.

I went check on Rosie and let her know what was going on, and then I followed Mason into the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). In that room, I counted 22 different people - surgeons, doctors, nurses, etc. - although there may have been more because everyone was moving around quite a bit. The team was able to start Mason on the ECMO machine within about an hour or so, with a few issues which later turned out to be more significant. I have never seen so many people work together in harmony to do anything, let alone perform a complex surgery on a baby.

Once on ECMO for a few hours, it was evident that one of the cathetars used to insert the blood back into Mason's heart was not inserted all the way. Because his was so little, and his right sided CDH condition made his arteries and veins follow some unusual patterns, the cathetar was not able to reach the heart. In order to make ECMO work for Mason, a lot of extra fluid had to be added into the circuit which was causing him to bloat very quickly. The solution was to perform the CDH repair , and try to push the cathetar in the rest of the way while they were in there. Becuase his arteries and veins were so small, the also had to add a couple of additional cathetars (to help measure vital signs and to draw blood samples) as part of this procedure. As a back up plan the doctors would have to open up his chest to put the cathetar directly into his heart.

The CDH repair went well as did the placement of the additional cathetars, however the ECMO cathetar was not able to be pushed in. By this time is was 4:00am Saturday morning. The surgeons went to get some sleep and call in a pediatric cardiac surgeon to perform the backup plan surgery.

The back up plan went off well. Finally, at about 10:30am Saturday morning, Mason finished "the most excitement in his first 24 hours after he was born." Because he had a chest operation, he was moved from the NICU to the PICU (Pediatric intensive care unit). All told, Mason had three major surgeries within 24 hours.