these are the doctors in your neighborhood

Today Ford's pacing wires were taken out, as well as the chest tubes. His heart still has an unusual ryhthm - but the doctors, though puzzled by it, say that it's not a problem. As for the chest tubes, the bleeding stopped Friday, as did the chyle once his feeds were switched to "monogen" which doesn't have any triglycerides. They will keep him on 100% monogen for two weeks to make sure the thoracic duct heals before restarting his fortified breast milk diet. When they restart the milk, they will be watching closely to make sure the duct has healed - we would see difficulty breathing if his chest was filling with chyle again, and a chest x-ray would confirm. But hopefully the duct is well on it's way to good health and in two weeks time, he'll be switched back to milk seamlessly.

Two weeks - I wonder what else will be different then? It's amazing how much he's changed in the past two days. His colour is much better - he's down right (relatively) rosy. When he cries he still gets "blueberry head" as one nurse called it, but I think that's a somewhat permanent condition. He otherwise is breathing on his own. Yes! No bi-pap mask! Yesterday they trialed him off the mask for two hours. It went well, but his work of breathing was increasing a little so they went to put it back on. He threw such a fit that they gave up on the bi-pap and decided to try putting him on high flow. He got even MORE upset and de-satted to the 40s. They let him settle off any breathing assistance and his sats recovered. To avoid another meltdown, they let him stay unencumbered, just with an oxygen mask near by so he would get some "blow by", and decided to wait and see how he did. He had some mild in-drawing throughout the day, but not enough to warrant high flow or bi-pap, and now, Sunday night, he is still breathing freely on his own.

THAT'S very exciting, considering Dr. Seer thought he'd need at least a couple weeks before he could be weened. Yay Ford!

They also took out his ART line - not because they wanted to, but because it stopped working. That leaves his PICC line, a peripheral IV, and NG tube and NJ tube. Practically nothing!

Ford does seem to be continuing to return to himself. We're waiting for him to smile again and keep watching the "birdies" video below to remind ourselves of how beautiful it is. We miss our happy baby!

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Children's Hospital has these cardboard stand ups scattered throughout the hospital featuring various staff members washing their hands with Microsan pushing the slogan "Stop the Spread". I think they're funny - some of the Doctors are in scrubs in their photos, some in "street clothes", a couple in full-on spandex bicycle outfits. And what I really love is that every couple weeks, they get rotated through the various locations in the hospital, so that a new cardboard Dr greets you at the elevators, or by the cafeteria. I don't know who's job it is to switch them up, but I always look forward to that day of the month.

This is Dr. Sanatani's cardboard mannequin (we've never actually seen Sanatani smile in real life):
This is Dr. Campbell who did Ford's surgery:And this is Dr. Hayley, Ford's pediatrician: