Backstory, Part Nine

Last September, I started to re-tell the story of Elijah's first few months of life, because there's a fair amount about our daily lives that doesn't make sense without the background information. This is a continuation of that story.

***

When we made the move from Hospital One to Hospital Two, we moved out of the loaner RV in the Hospital One's parking lot, and in with Dan's aunt and uncle. I spent all day at the hospital, then came back to their home--restful is the only word I can think of that really describes it. The house was probably sixty or seventy years old, and had all the attendant charm--high ceilings, graceful trim, lots of wood-framed double-hung windows. We had the attic bedroom, wood-paneled and cork floored, with a lovely old rocking chair and a view of the neighbor's garden, and, blessing upon blessings, our own bathroom. His aunt and uncle were quiet, and respectful of the stress we were under, and didn't expect us to make small talk.

I was still pumping every two or three hours during the day, so I'd come back from the hospital in the evenings, eat a quick dinner--various people from our church network were providing food for us, bless them--and head up to our bedroom to pump, and just enjoy the stillness, and the view of the neighbor's garden out one of the windows. In the mornings I got up, pumped, rode the excercise bike in the basement, took a hot shower, read The Economist or something else equally mentally stimulating and totally divorced from my life of hospital rooms over breakfast, and then headed back to the hospital in time for my next pumping. I was in a daze, and always starting laundry and forgetting about it, and Dan's marvelous aunt would come along behind me and finish the laundry, and wash our dishes and offer me cocoa, and generally take care of me.

As the days went by, post-op, Elijah's swelling started to go down, and the placement of the vent became less precarious. They could move him, a little, without his sats dropping, and so were able to start gradually backing off on his sedation levels, so that he could start "waking up" a little. That was the good news.

Then there was the bad news. The risk of lung infections for patients on a ventilator is higher than average, and Elijah developed congestion. The culture showed the beginnings of pneumonia in one of his lungs, and he started a course of antibiotics, as well as breathing treatments where they thumped his little chest with a soft rubber cup to loosen the secretions. His IVs were failing right and left, and finding new places to put them was starting to be difficult, so they placed a PICC line in his leg. But Elijah was in the one percent that gets a blood clot from the placement of the PICC line, and it was a big one. They started him on blood-thinners to dissolve the clot, trying to find that delicate balance where they could dissolve the clot in his leg, but not destroy the clotting necessary for healing at his incision sites. And the date for pulling the vent kept sliding later and later. This increased the risk for his lungs, and threatened the need for placement of a central line (with its own attendant complications) to run the sedation meds through (a PICC line was no longer an option).

Finally, two weeks after Elijah's surgery, I was greeted by the doctor on morning rounds with, "Well, we have no bad news this morning." It really was a first. Elijah was successfully extubated on February 14, exactly two weeks from the surgery date, and, although they had a little trouble getting him to wake up enough to breath on his own (he was on high doses of narcotics for pain management) we managed to annoy him into continuing to breathe, and avoided reintubation. (His average breaths-per-minute pre-op were forty-five to fifty; post-extubation, we were having to work to keep him at eight to ten bpm.)

Two days later, he was breathing on his own, on room air (meaning no added oxygen) and satting in the nineties. His clot--which was so big that the hematologist had told us it would take three weeks before we even began to see diminution, and months before it was totally dissolved--was gone, just like that. Another miracle. And, after seventy-two days in ICU, Elijah was moved to the floor. We were looking at going home in less than a week, after learning to turn his distractors, do his wound care, and administer his medications.


In looking back over my mother's emails to friends who were praying for us at that time, I see that she was expecting that post--the one where she said we should be going home within a week--to be her second-to-last, updating folks on Elijah's condition. It makes me want to laugh, and cry at the same time.