Story
Name
Maxley Ferguson
Injury/Illness
Heart Defect
Maxley, had his third open heart surgery on Wednesday, August 23, 2023. The surgery went well, and he was recovering well.
Unfortunately, Friday Aug 25th, 2 days after surgery his hemoglobin dropped so they took him back to surgery and opened him up to clean up the bleeding. That also went well, however when they closed him and added another chest tube, that tube hit and punctured his lung causing his blood pressure to plummet and sent him into cardiac arrest. They reopened him and had to perform CPR on him before getting him on bypass again. They were able to repair the lung, but the amount of trauma his heart and lungs went through, doctors brought him out of surgery on life support (ECMO) to let things rest and heal. After surgery, he was losing a lot of blood from the new chest tube. They were able to give him blood to supplement what he was losing, but after 2 hours the doctors realized they needed to figure out the new source of this blood loss, so they brought him back to the OR to open him up yet again. The chest tube had hit an Intercostal artery and that was leaking and causing the blood loss. Luckily, the doctors were able to repair things, and as of today (Saturday) things are looking a little better.
Maxley will stay on ECMO for the next week or so. There are several risks with ECMO so the sooner he can get off the better. Once he is off, there will be several weeks in the hospital for recovery and weaning off all the narcotics.
Given that Maxley had to undergo CPR, the risk is that there is brain damage. We are all just praying the doctors acted quick enough and he got quality CPR and he will suffer minimal to no brain damage.
It was supposed to be a week/week and a half hospital stay, has turned into much longer. My sister is living in the hospital full time as to not leave Maxley’s side, so she can’t work during this time and doesn’t have enough PTO time coming.
I also lost my husband unexpectedly, 4 days before Maxley was born.
