Lucas Camilo

Friday came and went without the equipment arriving, meaning that Lucas’s homecoming will not happen on Monday.  We appreciate all your messages expressing frustration and solidarity (though Lucas has been a little disappointed at the number of public comments on his blog lately), and we’re confident that things will move forward this next week.  In the meantime, we’re having a little gathering this afternoon to celebrate Lucas getting released from the hospital.  Once he’s home we’re going to have to be careful about having a lot of people over – because of germs during flu season – so we figured we’d throw a housewarming/welcome Lucas party before he actually arrives.  We’re trying to see if we can get a live video feed from room 638 at Children’s.

And what about the little guy?  In all the hubbub about health insurance and medical equipment we haven’t gotten around to writing about Lucas himself for a number of days.  Well, we’re happy to report that he’s doing great, as ready as ever to leave the hospital.  He had a couple little bouts with vomiting yesterday but in general continues to hold down his food and gain weight.  He’s also been spending more time off the vent, and yesterday one of the respiratory therapists who has a lot of confidence in Lucas made the executive decision to leave him on the trach collar for about 5 hours (though it was only supposed to be 1-2).  He did fine, breathing steadily throughout and not building up many secretions in his trach, which happened the previous time he was off the vent for an extended period.

Perhaps best was his performance on Friday while we were running around talking on the phone to case managers, insurance representatives, doctors, and medical rental companies.  In the midst of it all, Lucas got very fussy – turning red-faced with an elevated heart rate – and was awake for nearly 6 hours straight, by far the longest such stretch ever.  Obviously he was pissed off about the health insurance situation like the rest of us, but what was interesting is that during that time he kept demanding his pacifier, and in fact it was the only thing that would keep him from throwing a fit.  We were a little worried for a while but then realized that he was just acting like a typical 2 1/2 month old baby.  That being said, we never thought we’d be so excited to see him suck a pacifier (the name of the device is problematic enough – no righteous baby deserves to be pacified!) but seeing him work so long and steady on the “binky” was a real pleasure.

In other news, Lucas is already growing out of hand-me-down outfits that he hardly ever got to wear.  The real problem areas are his amazingly long limbs, especially his legs, which force us to turn pants into shorts.  We cut the feet off of the sweet alligator onesie that his aunt picked up for him at the newborn second-hand store, and he proceeded to sport the outfit for a couple days straight without puking on it!