Surgery day... August 10, 2005 Arrived at Johns Hopkins Hospital at 5:50 am. Took care of some minor paperwork and got him changed into hospital gown. We carried him into the OR at 6:45 am and set him on the air-heated bed/table where a whole team took over getting him hooked up to monitoring equipment. They anesthetised him and he fell asleep in a few minutes without a fuss. We walked out and got updates through the Patient Representative in the waiting room. There was a delay getting blood so surgery didn't start until 8:45 am. At approximately 10am, Sam was on the heart-lung bypass machine. The surgeon, Dr. Duke Cameron, went in through the right atrium, then through the tricuspid valve into the right ventrical to patch the defect (VSD) between the left and right ventricals. Unfortunately, the VSD was very close to the tricuspid valve and not visible through the valve. Dr. Cameron had to remove the valve to see and patch the VSD, then reattach the tricuspid valve. Sam's heart was arrested for 100 minutes due to this complication instead of a more typical 40 minutes for a VSD repair. Sam was taken off bypass at 12:05 pm with closing at around 1:30pm. He has some temporary pacemaker leads touching his heart and some drain lines coming out of the incision. He also had a nasal-gastric tube, central line, breathing tube (ventilator), catheter, EKG leads, pulse-oximiter, IV lines in his foot and hand. Quite alot of tubes for a little guy. We caught a quick glimpse of Sam as he was wheeled from surgery past the waitng room to PICU. He looked pretty good, all things considered. We had about 30 minutes to grab some lunch before we could see him in the PICU, so we jumped at that opportunity and made a phone call out with news to be relayed via email. (thanks Ginny!) After a quick lunch, we got into the PICU and stood watch over Sam and talked with doctors, nurses and respiratory therapists. Sam had breathing tube and feeding tube removed slightly after 5:00 pm.