22nd August 2006

Today is 'conference' day, it's where all the doctors meet to discuss cases and make the major decisions. Today is the day they decide weather our son gets his chance to live or dies. Earlier they had asked us what we wanted and had given us all the risks. If Dane was to have the surgery, one of his main hurdles was surviving the heart,lung bypass machine, there was an extremely high risk he would have a major bleed out in the brain which would give him major brain damage or make him brain dead. Secondly when they got into his heart, that the damage would be worst then they expected. A pacemaker was on the cards because the hole the infection had eaten through the middle of the heart were near the nerves that make the heart beat. Thirdly because Dane had been sick for so long and his heart had to work so hard that it may not restart when they tried to take him off the bypass machine. Knowing all these risks our answer was to go ahead with the surgery. He had proven them wrong so many times before that they owed it to him to let him prove them wrong one more time. We would rather have him die on the operating table, know that everything had been done to save him, then to sit by and watch him suffer.

It wasn't until 6:30pm that the surgeon, Dr Polhner came to see us. Yes, the surgery was going to happen- 7:30 tomorrow morning. Dane will be put on the heart,lung bypass machine, replace his damaged Aortic valve with a homo graft, repair the hole that goes from the left ventricle to the right atrium and scrape off the remaining infection off the inside of the heart.

He gave Dane a 10% chance of survival. I was surprised, I thought the percentage would be lower. Then Dr Polhner said the most wonderful, positive thing I had heard in all this time. He said," You have to have hope." It was the very thing that I need to hear and from that point I found some comfort.

Through the rest of the night, Dane's Stoic rate need to stay at 24 otherwise the surgery would not be possible. The doctors pumped 30cm syringes of fluid to try to keep it at that but it dropped down to 22 by morning. Dane's body swelled up so much that they could no long do the nappy up and his skin became thin and shiny.