The saga continues... with CT scans!

So it's been about 4 days since Ford hitched a ride to Vancouver on a retrofitted Learjet - a mobile ICU complete with gold accents.

While the trip itself was uneventful, the last few days have been an overwhelming whirlwind of ups and downs for all three of us. While Ford is suffering from some startling (and as yet unexplained) 'de-sats,' we are haunted by the memories of our previous experience here at BC Children's NICU and the dumpy, sandals-and-shorts-wearing-neonatologist Dr. Singh, who was on-duty for both Emmett's and Ford's admission.

We are the classic victims of the grass-is-always-greener longing for the way things appear on the other side. At the moment Edmonton and the Stollery hospital seem like an oasis of generous, high-quality family-centred care while Vancouver is the ghetto, backwater facility with a stressed and ill-tempered staff who would rather not have to deal with us, with the way we have come to expect things, with what we know about Ford and his temperaments, and with our undercurrents of uncalled for resentment at the general state of things.

Certainly we need to suck it up a bit, take the time to collect ourselves and get settled back into a routine. The people here are probably just as friendly as the folks at the Stollery and we just need to take the time to get to know them a bit more. In retrospect, there was something vacation-like about being in Edmonton these last few months. We had left our normal lives to go to this other place and have a baby and see what hanging out in an ICU for 6 weeks would feel like and then we would come home and it would all be over, or at least better (I'm thinking of opening an adventure tourism company that supplies these kinds of experiences to the blasé seen-it-all crowd of global jet-setters). I don't think I really thought about how it could all be simultaneously so different and so much the same. It is a bit weird, jarring, and kind of hard to explain.

As mentioned, Ford has had a few bad moments here where his overall stability was called into question and a few serious concerns have come to the table. He was temporarily put onto CPAP after being visually assessed as 'looking really sick' but had recovered to high-flow nasal cannula shortly after. Yesterday he had a bad de-sat coupled with a period of inconsolable screaming, high heart-rate, and tachypnea. He was eventually settled with Chloral and the cardiologists swung by to check his heart. There is some concern that his shunt has kinked, or that there is some narrowing/clotting in his 'neoaorta.' Both problems are apparently hard to catch on the echos that he routinely gets, so he's been sent for a CT scan to try and get a better picture of his heart. He was just wheeled past me (I'm in the CT waiting room writing this), so I should head back to the NICU. We were told the results would come quickly, so we should know whether these are real problems or not within a few hours.

We'll try to keep the blog going now that we're home. Ford certainly still has a long way to go, he has only had 1 of 3 heart surgeries and if the others subject him to similarly mired and complicated recoveries, this blog should continue to provide you all with a banquet of reality TV self-reflexivity, knuckle-clenching medical-drama, and off-coloured humour for years to come. Hope you all have the stamina to keep up with our little Ford Taurus.