Clinging to Jesus

Wow, if you would have asked me last night how tommorrow would go, I would have told you, without a hitch. Its like taking tonsils out at this place. They do this all the time. As many of you know my last request was a begging, and Ali and I are still on our knees. Cate's surgery, which was supposed to last about 4 hours total, from pre-op to post-op, ended up being 12hrs. Dr. Salazar said in all the surgeries he has done which is about 250 per year, he has never seen anything like this. He said that when they did the echocardiogram this morning they had a much clearer picture of what was going on in Cate's heart, then they had ever had before. And it wasn't a simple procedure he thought he was facing. I will not go into all the details because of lack of sleep and pure shock, but Dr. Salazar had to work on Cate's Pulmonary Veins, Pulmonary Artery, the two holes in her heart, work on the pulmonary valve and carve, literally carve out her right ventricle because it was almost completely shut because the muscle in was so thick. By the time he got finished doing all of this, Cate's little heart was absoluted in shock. He put her on a machine called and Echmo machine, which is the same as life support. He does not want her heart to have to work at all, because of how much it went through today. His hope is that she will only have to be on this machine for the next few days. They left her incesion open instead of stitching it up because they will have to go back in there to remove all of the tubes and to reconnect her sternum. He said he is confident in the surgical part of day, he said the rest is up to how Cate's heart will respond. There are some very serious fears, of which I will not metion, but believe me when I say they are serious, she is no where near out of the woods. We need your prayers for her now more than ever, this will be a marathon, and not the sprint we were expecting. Your emails, text messages, comments on the blog are so appreciated and your prayers are felt, and I mean that. Ali and I are holding up, as I said, I truly believe we are just in shock right now and we need our spiritual family shaking the gates of heaven on Cate's behalf, our behalf, and our other two beautiful children at home. I want you all to know that Ali and I will be remembering all of you and offering up this time of trail for you, our family and friends. As I went to laid down last night, I prayed for every person the uttered a word of petition to our loving Father on our behalf. We love you all more than we can put into words and our gratitude for you is placed at the feet of Jesus. I will keep continue to keep this blog updated so please keep up with Cate's progress. We remain clinging to Jesus in sweet surrender.