Small progress...

Small progress. It's funny how you can warp your mind into thinking that things that used to be big are small and small things grow big.

• It seems that Mikey's wounds are small things to the folks at Children's, but geez - a liver hanging out and a wide open wound seem pretty big to us.
• Seeing Mikey's still swollen face and thinking "Man he looks really good to me" seems crazy in any other situation.
• Asking the Physical Therapist and Occupational Therapist for a "Care Plan" that they simply must have been working from when they come to do therapy seemed to not only ask them to move a mountain, but more, to build the mountain, then move it six inches to the left.
• Making sure the nurses don't call Mikey "My baby" in front of my wife seems pretty small to me. Judging by the looks on their faces, it could've been like telling them their own Mothers gave birth to trolls.
• Asking for a Doctor to apologize to my wife for her having to find her son needing emergency surgery instead of responding to his pages 4 hours earlier is a small thing. Getting him to "man up" and do it - a big thing.

The list could go on, but I'll stop for now before that last one gets me going again. All in all, Mikey did look better to me than the past several days, and his color was much nicer, too. When I stood between his face and the sunlight today, he opened his eyes for a brief moment and caught my eyes, before fading back into his sedatives. That was worth the price of admission all by itself.

We're starting to go through quite a process in our home to make it really ready to bring Mikey home - something that's still going to take many weeks to do. It's starting to look like we'll need to make the front living room area a bedroom for Mikey. The nurses will need wide open, simply organized space to take care of our little man - and we'll want to hang out near him when we're home, too. Hopefully he can move into his room upstairs sometime in his first year - hopefully the monitors will be gone by then, too. I hear that kids with trachs get much better at not getting them plugged as they get a little older.

Speaking of nurses, it seems as though we have to integrate them right into our life. In the Care at Home book they gave us, we have to provide them places to eat meals, take breaks, put their clothes, etc. I gotta tell ya - this is not a process we're going to enjoy. How many of you have a house you'd want other people in 16 hours a day, everyday? I can't imagine what In home nurses talk about over their watercoolers...

• "Yeah my family had a huge argument last night"...
• "The mom and dad at my house did it 4 times!"...
• "Do they ever clean the grate on the front of their refrigerator?"...

Can you imagine? I still can't even really picture it.

Btw - to all that read this. If you know nurses, tell them all that we're looking for home care nursing in the coming weeks. Let them know to send me all the names and phone numbers of any nurses that are interested. Send them to mike at thinwires dot com. Turns out there's a massive shortage of nurses and he can't leave the hospital without home nursing setup. This could be quite a struggle.

In other news... my office is very nearly completed in the garage. One more coat of touch up on the walls and paint the trim and we're all done! So many people have helped so much - but Vic, Andre and Chris really made this whole thing happen. Thanks so much to everyone that swung a hammer, painted a wall, wired an outlet, etc. I can't believe we're actually done with it all. It looks really great - and I know I can close out the world back there and focus on work, when it's time to.