Here’s an update… We finally were greeted by the head surgeon at about 12:30 am last night/this morning and he had told us the surgery was complete and Stevie was in recovery. Without going into tons of detail, they did everything that they needed to do. He said it was way messier than they had planned and the infection was much worse than they had anticipated. The infection had made it difficult to remove the grafting that was done in 2019 and that took a lot more time to clean out that grafting material without taking out little pieces of the heart along with it. The blessing in this whole thing is before this procedure, she was 98% paste which means if she didn’t have a pacemaker, her heart would possibly only be half as fast or potentially not at all. We were shocked when he told us that the heart works perfectly without the pacemaker. They ended up not having time to put a new pacemaker in but did run leads out through her abdomen for an external pacemaker at this time. He said it’s not even need it but it’ll be good to have. He told us to get a good nights sleep because she would probably be on a ventilator and into baited until late today. We felt we needed to sleep somewhere where we had service so we did not sleep in the parking garage into the hospital tonight. Rather, we drove to Lot 11 and UCLA which, ironically is the softball parking lot. We ended up going to sleep around 2:15 AM. I got a phone call this morning at 6:48 saying that Stevie is off of the ventilator and is alert. It took about two minutes to gather ourselves and wrapped everything up in the back of the Tahoe and drove the four minutes down to the hospital. My wife is in with her now as they are only allowing one visitor per patient a time. She seems to be doing well.
I’m a firm believer that prayers work and God listens. Thanks to all of you guys and prayed, you had a hand in this and my family and I thank you.
She will probably need to be here 10 days or so to make sure that the infection is completely gone and that her heart is working properly. We are just glad we’re on the backside of surgery and if god is willing, we’ll be driving her home by next weekend.