Wednesday Update

Not exactly sure what to write here. Although a lot has happened we are still in much the same situation as we have been. Mommy is resting on and off, much of the time with the help of drugs. She is in a fair amount of pain most of the time but a combination of pain killers helps to keep the pain tolerable as long as we are not moving her too much.

She has been having a lot of mucous in her lungs and has required the doc going into her lungs with a camera and suction tube to find the little mucous spots and suck them out. Once we do that her breathing is pretty good until they build up again. As time goes on the time between these "cleanings" is getting more and more. Right now she is still on a fair amount of oxygen supplementing her ventilator. We would like her to be off oxygen all together and just on "room air." Today she was weened down from 45% oxygen to 25%. At 25% she is just barely holding on where she needs to be right now.

Through the help of a lot of wonderful people (and a bit of encouragement from daddy) it sounds like mommy's own ventilator will be here tomorrow. Once she gets transferred over to that we accomplished one more hurdle on going home. There are going to be lots more, mostly relating to her ability to keep her lungs clean and to a slightly lesser extent our ability to prove to the doctors that we can take care of her in her condition once she goes home. But at least we are knocking out the things that ARE in our control. We could be looking at 4-5 days more (at a minimum) to a week to 10 days or more.

It's very hard for daddy to split his time between the girls at home/going to school and his number 1 girl here in the hospital. Luckily Uncle Chuck is coming to the hospital tonight so that daddy can get home to at least help the girls get off to the bus one more time this week.

A HUGE thank you to those of you that have sent financial contributions. There are no words that we can say that can truly express how wonderful that makes us feel and what a burden that helps to relieve. No words except "Thank You." They seem so small but come with so much emotion.

PS - Hospital food ain't so grand after a while :)