Henry is in Surgery now

We arrived at the hospital this morning at 6 am.  Henry has been such a trooper. We were able to feed him at 11:30 last night then nothing but sugar water was allowed until 4 pm.... well, true to Henry form, he started to chat at about 3:45 and so I thought we'd give the sugar water a go (it's not like this is the sort of thing you give a baby!). Well, he quite enjoyed it. So much so that he decided to stay awake until we got to the hospital, after a good ole 30 minute snuggle fest with daddy. He was all smiles today (sorry, i can't seem to flip the picture). 

Henry and Owen really raised a ruckus in the clinic this morning...not crying, just a lot of chatter.  Notice a very tired Hal is still hanging in there with his "Movember"... only 2 more days to go :)

One thing I did not expect....which was nice, but at the same time extremely hard.... When they take an adult away to surgery, they put you on the bed and cover you up and off you go. When it is a baby, Mom or Dad get on the stetcher to hold baby and they wheel you to the OR that way. This was very emotional for us. Nice that we could enjoy as much time as possible with Henry before surgery, but hard to be so close to where it is all going to happen. Here we are waiting just outside the OR for the nurse to come and take Henry in.

Henry's hands appear to be bandaged because they put anaesthetic gel on them to numb them before some of the lines go in.  Because he constantly has hands in mouth, he would end up with nothing more than a numb mouth were it not for putting on the gauze.  He is in constant motion, so the tiny hospital 'gown' ( or mumu as Hal called it) didn't provide much in the way of coverage..

Dr. Ross just came out of the OR.  They have completed the imaging and they know which procedure they are going to do.  It is what we had hoped for - the Yasui (biventricular) repair.  It is a very complicated procedure. Out of 400 open heart surgeries that are done at Stollery in a year, 1 is a Yasui.  Dr. Ross feels that Henry is a good candidate.  Now we wait.  And now is the time we can use all your love, thoughts, and prayers to will everything to go well for Henry.  Dr. Ross expects the surgery to last until at least 1 or 2 pm.

One final image for this post..... Henry, though he has grown to about 2x the size he was for his first operation, still isn't that big...and he seems to be fairly amused by this fact...

Special thanks to our friends Kyle and Natasja who are taking good care of Magnus again today.