Things I Wouldn't Say Elsewhere

(Funny thing about this post...in a state of exhaustion last night, I accidentally posted this on Ella's site rather than this site. Oops! Will be interesting to see who read it before I caught my mistake. ha!)

I maintain the picture website of our daughter, and now son, mostly for out of town grandparents who like to keep tabs. In that forum, I generally try to keep it concise and G Rated. So, that's why I would not say on that website something like "We're still at the fucking hospital"...you know, because things like that tend to upset our parents even its the most honest truth I can muster.

And please, do not take my words lightly. I'm generally hardly even a PG-13 myself, but I'm at a lack for other words right now. Pat has always told me he cursed because it made him feel better. Maybe I get that now.

The shortest version of all this is that sometime in the middle of the night on Thursday, our son started choking on the contents of his own stomach, and it caused him to stop breathing for several seconds. This occurred at the nurse's station, while we were sleeping. This event bought him a minimum of 48 more hours in the hospital so they could administer antibiotics via IV to prevent infection. (He had aspirated at least some of the substance into his lungs during this event.) During this 48 hours, they also administered several tests to figure out what caused the choking. The results of that are that we know our son has a high level of reflux that we're already treating with medication. We also know that he has some breathing issues that cause his blood oxygen levels to dip sometimes, and he also tends to hold his breath for short periods -- especially when in a deep sleep. I guess I don't need to spell out why these are not good things.

Also, just for kicks and giggles, they did an ultrasound of his heart on Friday because of a heart murmur they were hearing on occasion. What came back from that has a little old red headed lady named Susie in the cardiologists' office downstairs up in arms. They're seeing some sort of hole in his heart, but only from one view -- when normally this hole should appear in every view of the heart. Susie and her colleagues have never seen this before, and are working feverishly to get to the bottom of it. We're fervently hoping that this hole actually doesn't exist (a real possibility) and that we can scratch the hole in his heart off our growing list of things that are going to shorten our lives by 10 years just because of the sheer stress of it all.

We aren't coming up with any firm conclusions yet, but we have another big test yet today that we're hoping offers the information that everyone needs to know in order to proceed with the best possible treatment. At this point, we know we're going home with a couple of reflux medications and a sleep monitor that is loud enough to wake the dead. The long term implications are unknown, and, its at least plausible that we could be free of all of this medical baggage within a few months.

As for the emotional status of our family, we take pride in being mostly level headed with just occasional bursts of any mixture of fury, fear, crying, and/or disbelief. Mostly the nurses and our families have been so good to keep us distracted and contemplating the positive. Our daughter has really pleased us with her relative maturity and flexibility. I'm sure it has a lot to do with all of her grandparents working hard to insure that she wants for nothing while we're away, but she's rolled with the punches and kept us laughing. And just being in a hospital maternity ward for this long offers its own comedic relief. Just the lady who came to show us how to run the sleep monitor who was quite impressed with our "intelligence" (which we only demonstrated by speaking in complete sentences) and the 21 year old first time dad who tried to carefully explain the concept of a wipes warmer to his nurse (as if this was the most novel invention known to modern society) is enough to make me have hold my stitches because laughing still hurts a bit.

No matter how you slice it, we're still absolutely smitten with our laid back little boy with hysterical facial expressions and his father's skinny legs. We are counting the seconds until we can be out of this fucking hospital and home with he and his sister. There we can kick back, relax, and let his sister take on the task of raising him all by herself -- as she has more or less told us she already plans to do.