Coarctation of the Aorta- what?

As most of you know Kaleb was diagnosed with AV canal Defect before he was even born. If you do not know this you might want to read previous notes I have written about it.
After Kaleb was born they did an echo cardiogram on him and discovered he also had something called...
Coarctation of the aorta: Part of the aorta, the large artery that sends blood from the heart to the rest of the body, is too narrow for the blood to flow evenly.
So on Monday May 2nd, Kaleb will have surgery to fix this problem. From talking to the surgeon it seems to be fairly simple surgery lasting only 20 min. but of course it will be done on a 5 day old preemie baby, which is always risky! The surgeon will cut away the narrow part of the artery and sew the open ends together. This is not open heart surgery, he will make an opening a little under Kaleb's left shoulder blade, on his back , he will go in moving his lung aside there is the artery, and he fixes it. He said from beginning to end it will be more like 4-5 hours, he said it will take about an hour just to sedate Kaleb! After surgery Kaleb will have a drainage tube there for a couple days.
Kaleb will be in recovery from this for about a week, we will still be able to see him though!!
They cannot give us a time of how long he will need to stay at Riley, but the surgeon did say he didn't expect it to be more than a month.
So if all goes well with surgery and recovery he will be home with us hopefully in about a month from now!
Then hopefully we live "normal" lives until he is about 6 months old and that is when they will do the AV Canal repair, which is the big surgery, because it is open heart surgery.
Thank you all again for your continued support and prayers,
In His name,
Ginger
p.s. I almost forgot, on Monday the results should be back from the Chromosome Test , the one that will tell us if Kaleb has Down Syndrome.