Apologies for the all text post. And the great delay in posting. There's a lot of catching up to do.
Spoiler: everyone is physically stable, doing a lot better emotionally, and just deep-sigh relief.
Details below:
The good news is that Bo's ramp-up to the terrible twos has him pretty much on par with his peers. His OT was just over for a home visit, and she was all, "Um, why am I here, again? This kid is SO not delayed." Jose was all, "Can you just play with him for an hour? He's sick of looking at me." He started potty training last month and is about 60% good. Woohoo!
He had his broviac (central line) replaced a few weeks ago. It stopped running in the middle of a Feldenkrais lesson, which we had to cut short. At first I thought it was a kink in his line, as they were horsing around. I unkinked and pulled straight every centimeter of line. I turned his pump off and on. I probed the insertion site. Nothing. Beepbeepbeep. "Down occlusion."
Of course, it was on the weekend, so we had to go through the ER. There are 2 pediatric surgeons, the one who fixed Bo's line when it sprung a leak last fall, and the one who saw Bo during this past ER visit. He was pretty cautious and conservative and was trying to brace us for worst-case scenario: "he might need emergency line-replacement surgery, radiology might not be able to clear it manually, if we run TPA into the line after radiology fails (drano for lines) then we'd have to wait several hours before being able to start surgery..." Oi vey.
Long story short, I put Bo down for his nap in the radiology suite, and the radiology team was able to manually unclog the line by shoving a wire through his line. Amazing. Both technically and emotionally. I could not believe how sweet and patient they all were. The Rad-doc and his techs just chilled in the adjacent computer room for like 20 minutes as I lulled Bo to sleep.
As the surgeon was discharging us, he admonished us to not go too far afield and that we needed to call and schedule replacement surgery as an out-patient procedure, that is unless we really wanted his line to get replaced emergently. Yeah, it's not hard to make a good decision when your options are spelled out like that for you.
We did go to Chicago several days later, as I had a work event. So we had a long weekend in Chi-town, and his line did occlude in the middle of the night part way through the weekend at 5AM, but I rolled his chubby butt over and it started running again. Big sigh. As you can imagine, I called at 9AM the following Monday to schedule the surgery.
We managed to have a great long weekend visiting with Tio Ren, Aunty Jennie, and Uncle Brian. I managed to do some power shopping (yay!) since I'm finally replacing my pregnant and pre-Bo wardrobe. It's still a struggle finding ways to love my mommas-body. Sigh. A work in progress.
His 2.2French Broviac placed at 3 weeks old was replaced at 20 months with a 4-something french Broviac. They warned us that they might not be able to pull the whole line, if the tip was encased in too much scarified tissue, and that foreign body would have the potential to host biofilm and bacteria and increase his chances of sepsis (not good). Well, the surgery went great, they pulled the old line no problem, and even though the new line has a bigger diameter than the last, both are actually so small, that the protective outer sheath is the same size. It looks exactly the same except on his left chest instead of his right.
Before the surgery, he was 80-85% for the potty training. Needless to say, he has regressed a bit, but is getting back on track. Even though this is a much longer process than most, and probably could have made it a shorter process if we waited a bit longer to start, the benefits to his butt were evident from the first day we started. His diaper rash is almost a non-issue! I can't believe how much diaper cream and cloth diapers we had been using daily!
Of course, my parents wanted to see him after all this excitement. So they decided to come for a visit last weekend. Which leads us to...
The bad news. My dad had a heartattack on his way into town. Luckily it started just as he was getting off the highway into town. And our house is literally a few miles from there. So we hustled him to the ER and they had 2 stents in him and up to an in-patient room within hours (!). I was pretty mad when I realized that both parents neglected to pack his even 1 of his 8 nitroglycerin tablets. He had bypass surgery 8 years ago.
And since my sister thought he was dying, she booked a flight to Michigan, so she's getting into Metro about now. And this whole time, I'm working on this huge project (nights, weekend, all the time). So I'll take a few days off and bring Bo to see my dad this weekend. He's still recovering from the episode, and I guess you have to be super careful the 8 weeks post-event to maximize the cardiac tissue recovery. They say whatever you've lost after that is pretty much gone forever.
Ming will return to Colorado this weekend, as Tung flies into town. I'm hoping my parents can tear themselves away from Ann Arbor. It's just too far from me, under the circumstance. And I know they'll miss it there, but I think it's time they moved to the 'Zoo.
Jose and I are having a double date with some old friends in town tonight. Saturday night we're planning to go to WIDR's dance party down the street at The Strutt and then onto a new friend's birthday party at Fire (local art collective). Sunday, I'm in church almost all day (!) and get formally welcomed into the Catholic church by Kalamazoo's very own Bishop! OMG, I never thought I would be this excited about church. Seriously. We'll pack up and cruise over to A2 after that and hopefully return home Tuesday afternoon.
In the background: I've got 2 huge work projects over shadowing my every move, and a seemingly unmanageable remodeling project at home to start (getting a proper studio built for Jose). The days are getting noticeably longer (hooray!) and this is the longest stretch we've gone without having to sit with Bo in-patient (touch wood). I'll post pix tomorrow night.
Blessings!
