Isaiah 7.17 : Updates, etc.

we're still in the hospital right now but we expect to be discharged around supper time. Isaiah threw up this morning at around 4am so we just wanted to make sure he was taking in his fluids fine and holding them down before we hit the road. Since we're getting discharged so late in the day we're just going to stay with Angie for another night and get on the road in the morning. We're going to take the drive slow and play it by ear with how we do with him. We should hopefully be home late on Sunday night.

Thought I'd sneak this in before bed since I won't want to do it early tommorrow before I head back to the hospital. Isaiah is doing pretty good. His pain seems to be managed pretty well, its more the frustration with the casts and his headband and IV tap in the head. The prelim from the ECHO on his heart is a negative on the murmur, or at least they said all looks normal on first glance. The cardiologist is going to take a closer look and be in the room first thing in the morning. Dr. Fearon showed us the surgical pictures of his fingers and toes and they looked great. It was just awesome to see 5 fingers on each hand. It makes me cry happy tears just thinking about it. We only had to wait 378 days to see them. He also said once he's all healed up in the hands we should try to get the head surgery taken care of before the end of the year and that that would most likely be the last surgery for five years or so!!! Anyways, a good note to go to sleep on.

Isaiah got out of surgery today at about 12:30 cst and got through it all fairly well. He now has 10 fingers and 10 toes! They're gift wrapped in some blue casts and we'll get to see them in person for the first time in about three weeks unless he pulls a Houdini act again. The new pulse ox (SPO2) sensor worked great and the nurses seem to like it other than it only works with the newest readers which not all the rooms have yet so the vendor had to set up something special in our room so it reads into the central monitor computer the nurses can see at their base station. He didn't seem to react well to the anesthetic gas today. First he started trying to chew the mask when Dr. Blakeley started administering it and then his Blood pressure and heart rate would drop some so they ended up using more narcotics than last time so he's been sleeping pretty soundly since getting out of the OR. When the heart rate dropped the anesthesiologist noticed that it sounded like his ...

We were up bright and early this morning at 4am to give Isaiah his last bit of juice before the 4:30 cutoff. As we were getting ready he went back to sleep and we noticed a bunch of thunder outside. There ended up being some pretty major storms this morning so we hopped in the car and were trying to beat out much of the rain that seems to be dogging us the whole trip. As we were about to get on 35E there was the worlds longest freight train crossing in front of us and it took nearly 10 minutes to pass by. We were anxious enough for the surgery, but the looming storms made us that much more frantic. Eventually we were on our way again and got to the day surgery unit before the sky opened up on us. Unfortunately we left the camera in the car so I had to run back out to the parking lot. By this time it was absolutely pouring and I got soaked, but we got some cute pictures and two hours later I’m dry. Another new thing is that Isaiah is testing out a new pulse ox sensor. He’s the ...

The preop appointments went well for the most part. We do have a bit of a worry though. Apparently the hospital is not considering themselves in network right now because Coventry did not pay them according to their contract for the last surgery (something like only $2000 out of the $35,000 they should have gotten) While we understand why the hospital is leery of getting a letter of agreement worked out again especially since Coventry didn’t honor what they signed last time, but it would’ve been nice to know this before the trip. Instead we learned this at check-in when they asked how we’d be paying the $10,000 out of network deductible. Well we haven’t paid anything other than the deposit to Dr. Fearon and we’re sitting in the surgery waiting room as I write this at 8:45am on the day of surgery. Dr. fearon’s office is making some calls and hopefully it all gets worked out, otherwise we may have a fairly big bill in our future. Before that ever happens we have a bunch of differe...

We got on the road at 11:30 yesterday which was pretty good for us. There was a lot of rain on the drive again, but we powered through at slower speeds and eventually made it to my cousin Angie's in Coppell where we're staying. Isaiah gets to see his older second cousin Karsten who was apparently so happy to see us he decided that clothes were just too much for him so he spent much of the evening running around naked. It was pretty amusing. I don't think Isaiah knew what was going on though, he just kept watching with a puzzled look on his face. Again we had problems getting him to bed. I'm thinking he was sleeping so much in the car these last few days and stuck in the car seat when he's awake that he has all this pent up energy that he needs to get out and it took until 11pm last night, plus he woke up at 2:30 for an hour. This morning we woke up to some horrible screams and we thought something really bad happened. As it turns out it wasn't so...

So really it's the morning of Day 2, but whatever. We're in Vicksburg, MS since its about the halfway point in the drive. We've driven all the way through before, but it makes for a super crabby kid so we tend to stop here or in Jackson. We didn't get a ton of good sleep last night as Isaiah was up almost every hour on the hour, plus he didn't go down until 11:30 our time, a whole 3+ hrs past his normal attempted bedtime. He must be really excited about his surgery because he's been super hyper lately. He was up until 1:30am the night before we left! We were supposed to meet up with my cousin Walt who just moved to Tuscaloosa, AL, but because I forgot that AL is already in Central time zone we were off by an hr. I knew there was going to be some nasty rain so we plugged on and I'm glad we did because if we hadn't we would've been driving at 35 mph in virtually no visibility and flash floods for more than the 2 hrs we did. There was a nice litt...