Overview; 2 Weeks Old

The doctors and nurses are fantastic. It's a cliché, I know, but it's impossible to avoid it when you watch them working and their job is to keep your babies alive. Aly and I both have to leave them to it and have the faith that, if one of our boys knocks out their breathing tube, the nurse will be there and it will be put back in again. (In their two weeks in the NICU, they have had to be re-intubated three times. It happens, apparently).

We have got to know these care providers a little better over the time and there have been some conversations where the events that we have written about here have been discussed from their perspective. Aly and I have both been insistent that we "can take it" and would rather hear the truth, even if it is grim, than some sugar coated, overly optimistic pseudo-truth.

Things we have learned from some of our off the record conversations;

• Henry's worst event was his pulmonary hemorrhage
• Charlie's worst event was his bleeding after the drain was put in
• The day Charlie had his drain and bleeding was one of the hardest shifts that his very experienced nurse can remember
• That same nurse thought that Charlie was going to die and the numbers she saw on the labs on his blood were the lowest she has seen, apart from in babies that died
• Our boys are the sickest babies in the NICU in The Pavilion (as I put it to Aly one time, even the people in the NICU feel sorry for us)

I am sharing these grim truths with you because I am very proud that our boys have survived such difficulties and are fighting on. I started writing this post last night and finished it here at my desk at work. Yes, I had to face the reality of life and come back to the office for the first time in several weeks. While eating my sandwich, I decided to finish the post as some sort of therapy. I tell my boys every day that I am proud of them and I will do so again a little later than normal today. In the meantime, this will have to do.

(D)