29 December, 2013

Aly and I are beginning to find our feet in the new location and Charlie and Henry don't seem to have noticed the change.

Charlie has a head ultrasound tomorrow (Monday) as he does every Monday and, for the first time, we are feeling a tiny bit hopeful about it. We are still terrified - terrified with a little shake of hope on top. We'll see. Other than that, he has come off the steroids they put him on to help recover from his surgery and seems to be doing ok with it. They have been slowly increasing the amount of milk they give him and he is tolerating it well. He is growing and he looks great as you can see from the photos below (Charlie is the one in the hat).

Those of you that have read all of the blogs know that Charlie tends to get more of the column inches while Henry has been quietly growing over in the other isolette. As a reminder, though, Henry also has a perforated bowel and the difference has been that the way he has dealt with it has been a little less urgent - or emergent, as they say in the hospital. We agreed with his surgeon a few days ago that it was becoming time to operate on Henry (prompting the move). As I write this, it is Sunday afternoon, and Henry is the first into the OR tomorrow so that will be about 7am. As worried as I am about my poor wee boy having surgery, it now can't come quickly enough. You see, Henry has been retaining fluid for over a week and, without going into one of my amateur hour explanations, we need to fix his blocked intestines so that we can address this fluid retention. We both really like the surgeon that is doing the operation (with a smile, I am a tiny bit worried if he can be a good surgeon because he isn't an arrogant expletive deleted). Here's a photo of Henry today;

So, in summary - early start for our family tomorrow (Monday) and one that, by the end of it, we hope to have had more good progress reported on Charlie's head and a successful surgery for Henry.

(D)