UPDATE: Thank you to everyone who has been nudging me to keep up with my blogs. I never imagined so many people would actually be interested in my life (or maybe it's really my son's life you're interested in...). Sorry for the long absence. As many of you know, our son is finally home. He has been home for a couple months now. He was in the hospital for a grand total of 61 days. 61...long...days. It's been great to have him home and actually interact with him rather than just sitting in a miserable hospital room and staring at him.
Of course, I greatly underestimated the amount of work it would be to take care of a baby while working a couple part-time jobs. Thus, the reason for my absence from this blog. But today was my last day at my last part-time job. Tomorrow, my wife goes back to her full-time job and I officially begin my tenure as a full-time stay at home dad. I've been practicing for this day all summer! I can almost beat my wife in a race of who can put on a diaper the fastest...and I'm getting pretty good at cleaning up vomit.
So with my sudden increase of time at home, hopefully you can expect a more steady stream of blog posts with more tales about our lives as NICU survivors.
Anyways, to resume where I left off on my last blog post, our son had just completed his first surgery and the surgeon was optimistic that he could have his second surgery in just two days. To recap the surgery process: our son was born with his liver protruding from his body in an ugly green membrane. The day after he was born, his surgeon tried to push the liver back into his body and stretch the skin together over the liver then sew it up. He was not successful on the first attempt, so he built a mesh tent in the skin so that he could keep stretching the skin more and more each time until it closed up. Sounds fun, right?
We had imagined that our son would have a good period of time to rest before the next procedure. Only two days to recover? Okay...so two days later the surgeon comes back and whisks our son away for procedure #2. We go down into the surgery waiting room and only wait for about 30 minutes before the surgeon comes back. Another great procedure....but the skin was not quite closed yet. "We'll let him rest a little longer this time....we'll give him five days." It was weird. We thought two days was way too fast. But when we found it out it would be a five day wait for the next procedure, we felt like that was forever away! We just wanted our boy to be all healed up right there and then. I don't know, I think we were just expecting him to magically be all healed up and ready to go home in less than two weeks. It was a bit tough when reality set in that he would be staying in the hospital for awhile and there was nothing we could do about it.
I think the toughest part about the whole staying at the NICU was the room he stayed in. It just had a terrible "hospital-like" vibe where we were almost expecting someone to die suddenly (luckily, that never happened while we were there). We had to wash up to our elbows with special soap every single time we wanted to go inside and visit. The chairs were uncomfortable. It was dark and depressing in there. But strangely, some of our happiest moments with our son happened in that room. The first time he opened his eyes and looked at us...the first time he gripped our fingers, the first time we were able to hold him, sitting watching him grumble in his sleep and being grateful he was still alive.....the worst love-hate relationship I've ever experienced.
Every day was so unpredictable whether it would be a good day or a bad day for him, or just an average day. Every morning when we woke up, my wife would call the hospital for an update and I remember studying her facial expressions and being able to tell just from that what kind of day it would be.
Each room in the NICU can hold up to 4 babies. The whole time we were there, we watched about 7-8 babies come and go. It was tough on us to watch these babies recover quickly enough to be able to go home, while we were still stuck there. We wanted so badly to just go home and go back to our normal lives again...
But, the best part about our son's first week of existence? It was finals week!!! Our favorite week of the year! As much as I was ecstatic to take five final exams, I decided it would be best to email all my professors and see if I could work something out so that I did not have to commute back and forth everyday to take all the exams. To my surprise, one teacher let me take it electronically and three teachers let me completely forego my exams because I already had a good grade in their class (kids, that's why you keep studying in college). Only one professor couldn't stand that I would miss out on the fun and forced me to drive back to Provo to take his final. I didn't even study...I was a bit preoccupied with other stuff... like trying to wrap my mind around the fact that I was a father of a NICU baby. I went back to Provo one day that week to gather a few things and I decided to just take the final....and passed! I've never been a good guesser, but for some reason, I was on my game that day.
Next obstacle: I was supposed to begin an internship with BYU. I am studying Facilities and Property Management at BYU, and the program requires students to complete an internship with their Physical Facilities department. But luckily, the internship was very flexible with scheduling and they let me pick my own schedule, just as long as I logged at least 120 hours of work. I decided to work Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings. So my schedule for the next several weeks looked like this:
Sunday night: Find a way back to Provo (since the train doesn't run on Sundays...) and sleep there.
Monday: internship 8-12pm, eat lunch, do errands, take the train to SLC.
Tuesday: spend as much time as possible with my family, take the train to Provo, sleep there.
Wednesday: internship 8-12pm, eat lunch, do errands, take the train to SLC.
Thursday: spend as much time as possible with my family, take the train to Provo, sleep there.
Friday: internship 8-12pm, eat lunch, do errands, take the train to SLC.
Saturday & Sunday: stay in SLC with my wife for the weekend, trying to keep busy as much as possible to avoid going insane from staying in the hospital all day.
Rinse and repeat.
Shout out to my brother for buying his truck at the perfect time, and letting me drive his old car around Provo to make everything work out almost perfectly.
That's one thing I will never understand. How everything was supposed to be a disaster, but instead, ended up working out perfectly. Too perfectly....
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