WHEW!!!

WHAT A DAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Sorry I couldn't post a message before now, but I couldn't get away to do it sooner than this. It's been an extremely chaotic two days.

First, Liam has a brand spankin' new feeding tube, so he's the envy of all the other aspirating babies at the hospital now. ;)

I have never been in a hospital that was so swamped. We were bumped to a 2 p.m. surgery slot yesterday and then didn't actually go to the OR until after 4. Consequently, we couldn't get a bed last night so we spent the night in a holding room in the surgery ward. It was very weird. We were assured we would get a bed this morning. It's now 7 p.m. and we were JUST moved to the cardiology floor a few minutes ago, 15 minutes before the surgery unit closed for the weekend. I was getting nervous that we were going to be in a broom closet over night, but we have a lovely room and (THANK YOU, GOD!!!) favorite nurses we actually know from our last hospital stay. Even more remarkably, they remembered Liam and were happy to see him again. Either that or they should have careers as actresses instead of nurses.

Yesterday, Liam's surgery went according to plan (except for the timing snafu) and he came off the ventilator immediately after surgery. Yahoo!!! He did great in the recovery room. He did have a very rough night until Mama got quite stubborn with the doc and insisted that he give him the appropriate type of pain meds. Can you imagine wanting to relieve post-surgery pain in an infant with only Tylenol? Duh.

Today has been an extraordinarily difficult day. I am discovering that it's best to have cardiology nurses take care of cardiology babies, because if anything unusual happens with a cardiology baby's heart or respiratory rate, non-cardiology nurses tend to get quite anxious. When that happens, Mama gets nervous, too. Liam's heart rate and respiratory rate have been dropping intermitently all day, which was worrying his nurse downstairs to no end. Cardiology was called for a consult and pronounced him fit as a fiddle, but they moved him to the cardiology floor so his nursing would be more specialized. This makes Mama exceedingly happy.

We were supposed to be discharged today but they were so busy downstairs that they didn't get his feeds started on time. Consequently, he can't go home until he proves his new tube works. So far so good--we're up to 60 mL feeds now and he usually eats 78 mL at a time, so we're nearly there. We're hoping for a fairly early discharge tomorrow. We'll see how that works out. Please pray we get to go home ASAP. We're ready to be out of here!

More when possible...

In Christ,
Bill and Lisa