Moving right along

There are a lot of changes scheduled to be happening this weekend. Yesterday, they told us they were hopeful to get us out of the ICU either that night (didn't quite happen) or sometime today. That's still the hope, but the beds on "The Floor" are all very much occupied. Currently, they're waiting for a bunch of discharges to go through so that we actually have a place to go, so that may not happen until this evening or tomorrow, possibly. It doesn't effect much, aside from giving us a little more time in our super nice single room. When we move, it'll more than likely be to a shared room. No big deal, but I have to admit, we have gotten just a little spoiled here.

Overheard the nurses talking this morning, though, and we may also have to move all of our accumulated junk to a different room in the ICU before we move out, too! (Do you know just how much stuff seems to stack up when you spend twelve hours a day in one room?) Seems kind of like a waste of time and energy for everyone involved (they'd have to go through and sterilize two rooms behind us, instead of one, and moving all his equipment isn't exactly done at the snap of one's fingers), but I guess they like to have recently post-op kids down at the other end of the hallway. Ironically, we'd be moving back into the room that we were moved out of after surgery!

I've only got the one picture today, so I'll just make it extra big...

Looks like our company for the day is going to be in the form of my little sister, who drove out from Idaho last night...she's picked a good day to see him, because all the puffiness has gone down in his face (so now they're going to switch from IV to oral diuretics, because they aren't quite so necessary), and 75% of his tubes are gone. The plan is to remove his last IV before he leaves for The Floor, and possibly his nasal canula as well!! He's had that thing in his nose just about since the day he was born. They took it out for a bit when he first got here, but then decided he actually needed it to help him remember to breathe (apnea caused first by the meds for his PDA, then because he was so sleepy from the morphine after surgery). Lately, he's only been on 23% oxygen, so it's hardly been necessary at all. To put that in perspective, the oxygen saturation of the air we breathe daily is about 21%.

So now, we're on to the real recovery stage. Essentially, we'll just be monitoring his stats and making sure he is getting full feeds, filling diapers properly, and gaining weight. There's a chance they'd have to supplement my pumped milk to make sure he's getting enough calories, because healing takes an awful lot of work. Babies that have recently had surgery tend to need more intake than babies that just have to concentrate on sleeping and growing.

More good news is that the nurse practitioners from the floor that we talked to this morning don't think it'll be the full four weeks of recovery that we were told to expect! We obviously don't know how long it'll take for him to be ready to go home, and they like their patients to stay in the area for about a week after discharge for checkups, but everything we've seen so far looks very promising. Here's hoping that things go smoothly!

Mom's coming in tomorrow morning on the train! Yay! But Tanner has to leave to get back to work tomorrow night...not so much yay. Oh well...things are moving along, and I'm sure that when this is all over and done with, the time we spent here will feel like the blink of an eye.