She's peeing!!!

Hello, this is your freindly neighborhood reporter, Mr. Peppley, bringing you news from Seattle Childrens. Anna is indeed peeing, and that is a good thing. She started on a medication to make her pee, which in turn is to reduce the swelling she has encountered. By the way, the swelling is an expected side effect of the surgery, so no worries about that.

All in all, Anna is doing good - all things considered. Or at least I think so. The nurses are doing a lot more standing around and shooting the breeze than they did yesterday. In fact, I don't remember them doing that at all yesterday. So I take that as a good sign.

NOTE: the following is a sleeper of a paragraph, and it has some "technical" stuff in it. You are free to skip it if you want. Also, for any heart savy people out there, please feel free to correct my inaccuracies. I'll punch you in the mouth first when I see you corrected me, then apologize.

Anna is hooked up to a pacemaker, but that also is nothing out of the ordinary. Each heart has a primary node, which is on the atrium. The node sends an electrical impulse to a node on the ventricle via the septum (in a normal heart, that is...Anna doesn't have a septum), which tells that pump to fire. So the first node signals all the other ones to fire, and keeps them all in synch with each other. With Anna - and other heart surgery patients - sometimes the primary node doesn't communicate that will with the other ones, so the pacemaker is set up to help that. There are three "levels" of impulses that heart patients see. The first is having the heart do all of the work - all by itself with no outside help. This, of course, is preferred. The second is when the pacemaker "activates" the primary node, or the one on the atrium. And the third is when the pacemaker "activates" the ventricle node. This one is used when the communication line between the atrium and ventricle break down - whatever that reason is. The doctor (or, actually, the fellow) who explained it to me said it is not uncommon for the patient to go from one to the another and back again, or from any one to any other. So she could go from A to B to C, and then to A, then to C, then B, then to A...you get the picture. The point is, it's fairly normal and nothing to be concerned about yet.

Okay - I got through that paragraph. Phew! And when I sat down to write this post, I thought I would try my darndess to make it short...

Just one more thing. We really wish we could be in Tumwater tonight or tomorrow morning. Our church is putting on a Christmas concert, and it is always good - no - spectacular. And no - I'm not saying that simply because the director is my mother-in-law. So if you are in town, go to Mt View tonight at 7 pm or one of the services tomorrow, 9 or 10:45. Or if that doesn't work, go to one of your local concerts. It's good to get out and get a little bit of culture.

Love you all. Thanks for sharing with us! (mooch-mooch, hug-hug)