On Thursday morning the doctor called Brandon and asked for his consent to perform a procedure on Chaseton to enlarge one of the holes in his heart. Brandon gave the ok and Chase was taken into the cath lab. They inserted a catheter through Chaseton’s umbilical cord and up into his heart. They used a balloon on the end of the catheter to open up the tear. There were no difficulties during the procedure and they found no new problems in his heart. They were able to increase the size of the hole from 1mm to 5mm. This should allow an increase the the amount of blood mixing inside Chaseton’s heart.

We spent the rest of the afternoon taking turns visiting Chase and waiting for the anesthesia to wear off.  Before we left for the evening Chaseton’s nurse informed us that they would probably remove Chase from the respirator on Friday. We left with a smile thinking how nice it would be to see the baby without a breathing tube.

This is my FB post for Thursday:

Today was a rather uneventful day and that’s a good thing. Chase had a good night during which they steadily lowered the amount of O2 they were giving him through the respirator. He is handling it really well and we have hope he will come off of the respirator tomorrow. His blood O2 levels were good but not perfect so the doctors decided to perform a procedure that would enlarge one of the holes in his heart to help with oxygen circulation. They inserted a catheter into his umbilical cord and used a balloon to increase the size of the hole in his atrium. They were able to produce a 500% increase in size and we hope that will be a great help. Tomorrow will be another hopefully boring day of watch and wait.  Thank you again for all of the love. It really helps to lift the spirits.