After Adriel’s heart transplant on April 15th, 2024, he had eventually been brought back to his room with Riley’s hospital staff working to wean him off sedation and planning on extubating him as soon as they could, as well as getting him to wake up from post surgery.

Going into that next Thursday, mom reported he was very wiggly over night and that morning, and that they were afraid for his safety that he would pull his chest tubes or pacemaker wires out. His care providers decided to go up on the pain medicine to keep him sedated and comfortable. At this point, his new heart was still very dependable on the pacemaker, so they felt like it was too soon to take him off the ventilator. They decided to give him more time to rest and re-wean him off the medicine in hopes to help his heart rate go up a bit.

That next Sunday, Adriel still remained stable, and his care team planned to potentially try extubating him either that day or the next. He was currently still in heart block, making his heart beats, but they started to become too high. It was his lower left part of the heart that was having a harder time adjusting. His care team continued to keep working with the pacemaker and would plan to keep working with it daily. He got an ECHO the next day to see if there was a difference as well.

Monday, April 22, 2024 came, and Adriel was able to tolerate getting extubated and his heart had held steady! He was very tired, but still awake and mom and dad couldn’t be more ecstatic and overjoyed to see him wake up!

Mom reported, “He is such a warrior, I was literally thanking God last night for giving me such a warrior, because I don’t think I couldn’t have done this knowing he didn’t have this heart.”