Bouncing Back (Oct. 1)

(note: the server that hosts Lucas’s webpage was down this afternoon – sorry for the inconvenience.)

We came in this morning and found Lucas doing great: he was awake and wiggling, the settings on his ventilator had been turned down low again, and his right lung – which had partially collapsed during the extubation – was reopened.   Healthy lungs are especially good news to us because it means we can pick him up out of his crib and hold him.  By late morning Krista was “kangarooing” Lucas (holding him skin-to-skin on her chest) while all three of us rocked out to Bruce Springsteen.

As we listened to the song “Waiting on a Sunny Day” it occurred to us that there is a positive upshot of the unsuccessful extubation: Lucas might be coming home with us very soon.  Going ahead with a tracheostomy to open his airway is now pretty much inevitable, and though we originally were adverse to the idea, it’s clear that a trach is both necessary and the ticket to getting us all home.

We’ll write more about what it means later, but for now we wanted to share a picture, as well as a sad goodbye. The picture is of an incredible, full rainbow that appeared outside our window shortly after Lucas was re-intubated.  At the time we thought that the rainbow was a good omen, and then we found out later that it appeared in the sky around the time that a dear friend of Burke’s family, John Waller, was taking his last breaths in the world after a bout with cancer.  He and his wife Patsi have been avid followers of Lucas’s blog during the final weeks of John’s life, and we’ve been moved by how much Lucas’s story has impacted them (see their comment on “Choosing us”).  Patsi and her family are in our thoughts as we sit with Lucas this afternoon.

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1st October, 2009 This post was written by admin

Comments (1)

tom

October 2nd, 2009 at 10:12 pm    

nice photo! and home soon is a lovely thought :-)

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