Countdown

Today we went in to get Jonathan's blood drawn so a baseline of his electrolytes and some other vital stuff can be set. He complained about the blood test for about fifteen minutes - everytime he saw someone new he had to tell them what happened. It's really kind of funny when he does this - he'll go from just looking around to screwing his face up and issuing many complaining noises with his bottom lip stuck out. It sounds like he's saying, "You wouldn't believe what just happened to me!"

We will not know about the time of surgery until tomorrow, but we're supposed to start feeding him the Pedialyte tonight in preparation.

Leah and Katherine seem to have a cold today, as well. We have no idea where we caught it since we haven't even visited anyone for a week. I hope we can keep Jonathan from getting it and that we aren't all stuck here with colds during the hospital stay. I have the distinct impression that all we need to do is THINK "hospital" and we get sick!

I've done a bunch of shopping and we've planned meals out so that we can accomodate two weeks of having to do more running around than usual and I think the plan is going to be that Mom and Dad sleep at the hospital and some of us come during the day to keep Mom company. We have violin lessons rescheduled for tomorrow in an attempt to keep from missing any. So everything's pretty much as prepared as we can make it and hopefully the next week will go smoothly.

Jonathan, of course, doesn't have a clue what's going to happen. Good thing: looking forward to surgery wouldn't be very fun! Right now he's doing his standing-imitation with Anna - he really likes to stand if someone's holding his hands and he's getting much better at it. He even bounces up and down now and he smiles really big when he's standing up.

The order of business for Wednesday morning is 1.) circumcision (didn't get done when he was really little); 2.) pull-through of intestine lining to reconnect the colon; and 3.) repair of the peristalic (did I spell that right?) hernia that is caused by the colonostomy. The surgeon says he estimates it will take about three hours.

Last time, the surgery wasn't completed because of a problem they had inserting a catheter - Jonathan has an oddly-shaped urethra and they poked a little hole in the back of it, which meant they had to call in a specialist and get that all patched up instead of going on with the intestinal surgery. Then the surgeons didn't like causing him any more trauma, so they decided to let him heal up and try again later instead of really messing him up by doing more work than his little body could handle.

After all, he was only six pounds and a week old that time! Now he's 14 lbs 8 oz. and much bigger and stronger.