Hello,

After several sleepless nights, we are finally at a place that we can provide an update! For those that have seen on Facebook, Andrea has been doing much better. And this, obviously, is after so much.  Since the last update on Friday, Andrea has gone down then come back up. Friday was fairly quiet. She slept for much of the morning and afternoon. 

We had a family friend come down for a few hours and provide a break for me. It was much more needed than I thought. I went back to the camper to grab some food and ended up passing out for about 2.5-3 hours. I guess 4 hours of sleep or less for the previous 3 nights wasn't the best. I owe someone a lot for giving me that sleep.  THANK YOU! Also, we  had the BEST nurse ever staying by Andrea's side that afternoon and evening. Deanna was absolutely fantastic. She actually was retiring from Mayo Clinic after 43 years of service as a nurse and we were her last patient on her last shift.  The most amazing part was that you would not have been able to tell from the amount of compassion and hard work she put in to help Andrea smile just a bit. 

Saturday was a bit different of a story. The doctor came in early morning and felt that things were going well. She didn't notice any swelling and was happy with the perfusion of the flap. This ended up not being for long. About 11am, Andrea started feeling very yucky.  She couldn't get comfortable, she was shaky and cold and couldn't really get back to a normal.  Her vitals were out of whack too. BP was as low as 80/30, temps were all over the place, her pulse was as high as 120 and her SpO2 was as low as 88 with 2L of oxygen going.  Something was wrong.  Labs were done and an EKG. Labs showed her Hemoglobin was as low as 6.5  and her calcium was also very low.  She was given two more units of blood (for a total of 5 this hospital stay).

A bit later, the chief resident noticed that her left breast was starting to swell again but didn't feel that it was bad enough to go back to the OR.  We (meaning myself and her nurse) didn't feel the same way.  We spent the next almost 8 hours, with Andrea feeling like crap and drugged up, diligently watching, hoping that it would slow.  He came came several time throughout the afternoon to check in.  Finally, around 7pm, he agreed that it had gotten to the point that yet more surgical intervention was needed.  I found myself upset, worried that he had waited too long to save the flap that her team had already put 20 hours of surgery into. Especially given the phone call that I had with her attending the previous morning about that surgery being the last to save the flap.  Off she went to OR around 7:30 with him assuring us that he would do everything he could to continue to save it.  He was right.  And while I was mad that it had gotten to that point, I was extremely grateful that he did work hard. She was back in the room by 11:00pm, having had a hematoma evacuated and slow bleeders fixed that her heparin drip was the most likely culprit.  And while they were in there, they were able to observe that the flap was very healthy and that the tricky vein graft that was accomplished the day before was doing "extremely well" according to her attending during a phone call with me.

Sunday she was extremely tired from collecting about 23 hours of anesthesia over the past 4 days. The nurses were extremely diligent at trying  to get Andrea out of bed. We were successful at pivoting from the bed to a wheelchair twice and enjoyed the warm weather from the courtyard. Both trips were exhausting but enjoyable.  Today is more progress. Andrea was able to get showered and walked about 25 yards. She was exhausted again and crashed in bed as soon as she could. They continue to check on doppler sounds every hour until tomorrow morning. Her smile has gotten stronger each hour.  We hope that by Wednesday, she will be ready for discharge.

Thank you everyone for your prayers.  Andrea says that she's felt them all and knows that they saved her on Saturday.  More updates to follow soon.