Surgery Day

Hi. I'm Hayden's mom, Kristy. I will be posting for today & maybe some days that Hayden is in the hospital.

We all arrived at UMMC at 5:30am & were not sure what to expect. We were tired, nervous, but a little excited from the possibility of Hayden not living in pain anymore. We were shuffled around the admission process & finally prepped for the surgery in the holding room. The anesthesiolgist & surgeons came in to give us the pep talks & then Hayden was whisked away around 7:20.

From there, the waiting game began. Hayden's grandparents, myslef, her dad & stepdad were all there in the waiting room, awaitiating a surgery that could last 12 hours.

We got the first update from Dr. Sutherland & Co. about 5 hours after the surgery began. The pancreas, spleen & appendix had been removed. They even brought out pictures of the organs. Let me tell you, the pancreas looked pretty bad. It had necrotic (blackened) parts on it. Dr. Sutherland pointed out hardened, almost stone-like places on it as well. He said on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the worse pancreas he's seen, Hayden's was a 7.

Then it was back to work.

They took the pancreas to the lab to harvest the Islet cells & they then set out to reconstruct the small intestine. You see, Hayden had a Puestow procedure when she was 5. At this time, the doctor stitched a part of the small intestine onto the pancreas to help in drain. Now, they needed to fix this "plumbing" back to some sort of normalcy.

After another 4 hours, Dr. Sutherland came out to say they had harvested about 100,000 Islet cells. He said he would have liked more, but he was pleased with yield. As we had read in the literature, those who have had Puestows tend to yield fewer Islet cells than those who have not had the procedure.

Finally, at about 7:00pm the nurse came to tell us Hayden was in the recovery room. A little while later I went back to see her. She was in obvious pain, but drifting in & out of consciousness. She was in the recovery room for about 2 hours, then she was moved to the peds ICU.