Home Again

Well, we finally have everyone home again. It's amazing how long two weeks can seem when you're talking about a hospital stay and not, say, a trip to Florida.

There's a lot of little things we take for granted that are terrific and wonderful blessings. Such as being able to walk into the bedroom and say to Mom, "Do you think I should go drop the DVD's off at the library?"

Perfectly mundane question, right?

The answer is, yes, it's ordinary to the point of boredom. But it's still my blessing of the day and probably because of it's sheer ordinariness.

Jonathan's still on oxygen, but it's so low that he can actually be off it most of the time without hurting him. The thing is that having it on will make him get better much faster than if we took him off. All the equipment is pretty intimidating, though!

Right now he's hooked up to this compressor that takes room air and converts it to oxygen-rich air. Aaron points out that it's pretty quiet for a compressor, but it's still pretty noisy - you have to talk loudly to be heard over it. We also have a row of oxygen bottles (for taking him out of the house - as if we would want to!), a nebulizer, a vacuum suction machine, a pulse-ox machine (that doesn't seem to work right) for measuring Jonathan's oxygen level, boxes of medicine for the nebulizer, water for the oxygen machine, hookups for all the oxygen bottles, yards and yards of clear plastic tubing...all added to the bags and sealant and other stuff for taking care of the ostomy!

You would think we had one really sick kid here. I hate to see what you have to have hanging around the house if you have a REALLY sick kid. I don't think the bedroom will hold much more.

The biggest thing we're having to do right now is prevent a lot of auxilary drugs from being administered. Every specialist wants to put Jonathan on something for something - it's a good thing we haven't taken him to a foot doctor or he'd be reccomended to be on something for better foot development! The heart doctor wants him on several things "just in case", the pulmonary guy wants him on things "just in case", the floor pediatrician called our doctor and tried to strongarm him into giving Jonathan RSV shots at a nice low price of $1000 per shot once a month until May, and we haven't even gotten to the intestinal doctor to talk about closing up the ostomy. And everyone wants us to bring Jonathan in for appointments once a week.

Like I said, it must be really something having a truly sick kid!

Jonathan, however, unaware of all the things people want to do to him, is behaving quite normally. He's smiling much more every day (we can get a grin out of him every time by singing to him, his favorite being what we affectionally dub the "Playmate Song"), he's trying his best to roll over, and he's talking more every day. He now recognizes his name and reacts differently to different voices (he twists around to look at people when they're talking, even when they're not talking to him), complains, makes happy noises, and lets us know when he's hungry, which he wasn't doing originally. He did lose weight from being sick, going down to 9.3 lbs. He's back up to 9.8, so he's regaining lost ground pretty quickly.

And I have STILL not gotten RSV. I don't think I'm going to - the incubation time was a week, and all last week I spent a lot of time holding, caring for, and kissing Jonathan. Monday night I spent all night taking care of him. Here it is Wednesday a week later...and I'm fine. To me, that's a miracle.

I've got to go. I have work to do and a corned beef to check. That is our celebratory meal, now that everybody is home and we can eat dinner together for the second time in two weeks. Like I said...mundane, and my OTHER blessing of the day.