This was the 1st surgery performed on Jansen that left me crying my eyes out and there was no faith and no hope found in me. It was the moment I gotto prepare myself to lose him. Merely due to the fact they told me it was a super high risk surgery.
- He was still in critical condition, intubated, using high-frequency oscillatory ventilation machine to breathe.
- His lungs and heart were not stable at all, because his right chest was congested with all sorts of other organs, right lung was just a little bud, everything pushing his heart changing its angle, causing severe pulmonary hypertension.
- The above caused him to be in even higher risk of the given anaesthesia when they performed surgery for they feared his heart might stop.
However, it is either "do it and give him a chance but 50-50 risk, either survive or not" or "don't do it and he will be ICU forever eventually will die". I dare not sign the letter of consent until my husband told me "give him a chance". I digged out all my courage and nodded "yes" and had my husband signed the letter for Jansen to go through the surgery to fix his diaphragmatic hernia.
Here I want to write in my own way about how the surgery works. Basically the surgeon will make an insicion at his right abdomen near the diaphragm. The surgeon will use his skill to pull down all the organs in his right chest and rearrange them to their position (although it is impossible to be rearranged to the original state), check how big was the defect of his diaphragm and decide whether to just sew it or use a gortex pad as an artificial diaphragm. Jansen's hole was big around 3.8cm but surgeon manage to sew the hole by using the diaphragm muscle itself. So no gortex patch was used. Also, he had his appendix removed as it was no way to rearrange it to where it should be. So surgeon suggested "take out only lah".
Jansen's one is on the right side
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Surgeon manage to close his hole by sewing the muscles together
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Jansen's lungs x-ray before surgery. Right side was cloudy due to intestine, kidney and liver share home with right lung and right lung was a little bud - bloom please bloom dear little bud
*no pictures of Jansen during that period of time because partly we were not allowed to do so, and partly parents were not in the frame to take pictures, just able to sail through to stand strong for Jansen, and praying desperately he would survive.
Surgery was successful. BUT THEN they told us now it was up to Jansen whether his lungs and heart will be strong enough to keep him alive. What?!!! I almost fainted. Jansen stayed one month in ICU and 3 months in pediatric-respiratory ward. While in ICU, there were so many ups and downs that no words could accurately explain how we felt. They tried on him 6 types of breathing support machine to find out which suited him the best. I could not remember the terms except every few days he looked different with different mask which terribly scared me to think he might got worse overnight. I could only remembered there were oscillatory type, airflow type, pressure type, cpap and bi-pap (which he came home with).
On the other hand, I diligently supplied human's milk hoping one day his system would be stable to take it. And he did! He stopped TPN and they started him on 1ml human's milk/hour, and the volume increased day by day. To cut the story short, things got better and we were finally home after 4 months. Hospital was my 2nd home in that 4 dreadful yet hopeful months. Until today I can never forget all the faces of doctors and nurses that had saved Jansen's life.
He is alive and with us now!!!