A Brief Update on Luke

I know most of you have followed the updates on Facebook, but I wanted to post something just so I'll have the info later.

Luke's done great over the past few days. Wednesday night he got moved into one of the "private" little rooms in the NICU. Can I just take a moment and have appreciation for the fact we're at Baptist where they have private little rooms in the NICU, along with an awesome staff, calm atmosphere, and respectful policies? I love that we can visit any time around the clock except shift change (6:30-8 morning and night) AND that they will close the NICU to visitors if they have a new admission or any serious problem with one of their babies. A couple of times we've gone up there right as they were closing for an admit, and my mother-in-law had to leave once because they were admitting a baby. I'm ok with that. And if they have a serious complication they need to deal with, I totally respect the fact that they don't want visitors back there getting in the way. I'm sure we disrupted things quite a bit the day Luke was born and I'm glad they closed it so there weren't distractions while they got him stabilized. If it inconveniences me a little to have to wait or come back later, I'm ok with it.

Sorry for the little detour there. Anyway, since they put Luke in a room we were able to let Kaycie back to visit with him for a minute. She wanted to hold him but had to settle for holding his hand and helping me hold the bottle to feed him. Then she wanted to go back to the waiting room to play, because that's just way more fun. :)

He had an MRI on Tuesday and the word from the neurosurgeon was that he wasn't concerned by the size of the clot and didn't think it would have any long term effect. He couldn't tell if there was any subdural bleeding (inside the brain instead of on the perimeter) but if there was it was minimal and shouldn't cause any additional problems. He wants to do a follow up MRI in a month and will be seeing Luke for additional visits after he is discharged. I feel good about that.

Since then he's gone two nights without any major breathing episodes requiring oxygen, so today the doc said we could start the countdown. Today is Day 1. He has to have five good days before they'll send him home, so if all goes well we're looking at next Wednesday, exactly two weeks from when he was born. 

I'm pretty excited about that.

Today he weighed in at 8lbs 13oz. He's a growing boy. :)

Earlier this week the we began discussing the financial issue of this little emergency detour. It won't be cheap, but we'll find a way to deal with it. The part of the discussion that hit me pretty hard was when Greg pointed out that it's a really good thing we didn't buy the house we wanted a year or so ago.

We were very, very, very close to buying that house. It was a little over our budget and it would have made things pretty tight, but we could have managed. It was a great house. Perfect for what we wanted, really. The layout. A big extra "office" area. Large living room. Big master bath. Awesome deck off the back. Great neighborhood... But we just couldn't get comfortable with buying it. When the guy who had a contract on our house kept having to delay because he couldn't get his financial records in order, we took advantage of the opportunity to back out of both contracts. It was so hard to do at the time, because we wanted that house and we really really wanted out of this one. But it just. Didn't. Feel. Right. I've never regretted making that decision, but it always seemed weird that it felt so wrong when everything was perfect. I think I'm starting to understand. Now we're facing some monster bills, but we have some extra savings and a little extra room in our budget. We also have a paid for house that we can refinance if we need to. Medical bills of this nature can bankrupt people. I know that too well. But right now it's not real high on our list of priority concerns. We will take care of it one way or another. I can't tell you how nice it is to not have to freak out about that.