It really is rather amazing how one's mind copes with a lot of new, mostly scary, information. I will admit that last weekend was hard, but a tough lesson for parents of babies like Lyra. No procedure should be considered "routine". Even if it is routine, it's not uncommon for such procedures to uncover unknown problems and while you can't expect it, you should at least be ready for the possibility. Our mistake was having a plan for the weekend. We had thought we'd be taking Lyra home, maybe even that same day. Suddenly being routed back to the PICU after a much, much longer cath, and then being stuck in the PICU for the entire weekend, with surgery first thing Monday morning, was difficult.
Lyra wasn't too happy wth it either. Friday evening she was uncomfortable and in pain from the cath until they found a happy medium with her medications. Maren would go back and forth from the hotel to the hospital to nurse her, which helped to keep her calmed down. Lyra wasn't sedated during this part of her stay and she was fairly grumpy the entire time. At one point they discovered that her femoral line, where they give drugs and draw blood for labs, wasn't working, and a lot of the fluid they were giving was leaking, so the plan was to get another peripheral IV into her so they could take out the non-working line. Unfortunately Lyra is quite small, her veins are small, and she was upset and moving around a lot. This made getting an IV into her a major challenge. Two nurses, two doctors, and about a half-dozen needle-jabs later, they finally got it, but as any parent who has witnessed their baby get inoculations can imagine, Lyra was seriously upset with that entire process.
That was also hard, seeing her cry like that, for a long time, and not being able to do much at all to help is not something I hope to see repeated any time soon. Lyra is funny though, later that night, still cranky, they gave her some different pain medication and it must have made her feel a whole lot better because rather than falling asleep, she was wide awake, and wanted to play. She'd look back and forth from me to Maren with a "what are we gonna do now" look on her face. Eventually the medication did allow her to finally get to sleep. Although, she'd wake up as soon as you tried to put her on her bed, so I just decided it wasn't worth it and let her sleep on me. Maren came in a little later and nursed her into a deeper sleep and put her down to bed. In the long run, her little play time probably helped her stay sleeping through getting her femoral line removed (amazing!) and she slept all the way down to the operating room, which was what we were hoping for.