"Hurry up and wait" is my mantra today

    I'm sitting here in ICU at the UW hospital, all hooked up to monitoring equipment in my beautiful hospital gown, waiting to hear if I'm getting lungs or not!  I shall back up...

    I had my standard Pulmonary Hypertension checkup appointment and echocardiogram yesterday and although my fatigue has been greater as of late, things were all pretty normal.  I was home by 2pm and a typical afternoon and evening ensued.

    My cell phone rang a little after 9:30pm but I missed that call...but then my home number rang immediately and it was Christina from the lung transplant call center to say that they may have lungs for me and that I needed to be at the hospital by midnight.  That was a very surreal moment, to hear those words and try to have the presence of mind to ask pertinent questions!  I hung up and we went into action: Scot called Jessi to have her come to the house, I went to the kids' rooms (they were awake and aware something was happening) and told them that mommy got The Call.  They were relieved and worried and excited and full of hugs.  I showered, got my final 5-page lung transplant plan emailed to friends and family that will be called upon to help and we were in the car by 11.

    Throughout all of this, we took a moment to be incredibly thankful that my visiting mom, who was scheduled to leave on Thursday, was here!  Amazing timing!

    Got to the hospital ER for admitting, went to Radiology for a chest X-ray, and then headed up to the Cardiac ICU.  That's when I changed into the hospital garb and got poked and prodded and had A LOT of blood drawn.  We were told that nothing would happen until morning so by 3am, I think we all managed to drift in and out of something resembling sleep.

    Josh, a doctor from the transplant team (transplant is abbreviated tx so I think I'll be using that to save my poor typing fingers), came in about 6am with an update and this is still the latest info I have:

    The donor (we don't know if it's male, female or what the donor is coming from...very tight lipped about all this!) has a lot of organs that are trying to be coordinated at a lot of different places.  Right now, there's a problem along the line with coordinating the second liver so until they have that issue settled, they can't procure (remove) the lungs. And they also can't remove the lungs until the tx team gets to that hospital from UW...and it won't be until that time that the surgeon actually sees the lungs and determines if they are still in good enough shape for me. 

    From what I understand, once the lungs have been removed from the donor then they need to be transplanted into me within 6 hours.  But the longer the donor is on life support, the more likely it is that the lungs degrade -- pneumonia can set in, the gas levels can get screwy and other stuff.  So the lungs might be awesome right now but things can change very quickly...and they won't know if the lungs are a go for me until finally until the surgeon actually has those pink suckers in his hands.


    Josh said that it's likely that if the surgery is a go, it wouldn't be until later this afternoon or tonight.  But since we don't have a set time and I have to have an empty stomach 8 hours pre op,  I'm banned from all food and drink (not even coffee!) and I'm just thinking about all the food I can't eat.  Bummer.  But, you know, the good thing is that maybe I'll have new lungs by tomorrow. 

Or maybe I go home and begin the waiting for The Call, Part Two.

Love to you all!