Lucas Camilo

The short post-op blog update is this: Lucas is doing great.  He came home from the hospital just a day after surgery, and two days later he was back to school.  He appreciated all of the love – jokes, emails, videos, and emoji-filled text messages.  Thank you for your support.

The longer post-op story is that hospital stays are grueling, even when you’re there for just over 24 hours.  In many ways we are fortunate — Lucas hasn’t needed to be in the hospital for a long time, so some of the challenges that we’ve been through before manage to take us by surprise: doctors needing to be right all the time, even when they’re not; nurses determined to take vitals every 4 hours, even when the kid and his dad just need sleep;   discharge taking hours longer than expected because we need a few pieces of information that no one can figure out.  Hospitals can really suck for parents.

Meanwhile, Lucas was a champ.  He didn’t complain about the constant prodding, and when we asked him about pain he said it was minimal. We watched the Lion King (which Lucas had never seen before) and though it seemed to please the hospital nurse — who kept reciting the lines and singing the songs — even more than Lucas, it was a good distraction.  Lucas especially enjoyed reading all the emails and Facebook comments from friends on his iPad. Though we haven’t had a chance to respond to everyone, you should know that Lucas savored every word and felt genuinely special that so many people were thinking about him.

After Lucas got home from the hospital there was still some pain and discomfort so he ended up needing to miss a couple days of school for recovery — more than the doctors had told us he’d need.  But he rolled with it, saying that it just felt like an extended weekend. Burke had to go to Nevada for work for a couple days, but he got back in time for Valentines Day.  Although its not a holiday Burke and I usually get very excited about, it was so fun to see Lucas love feeling the love.  He was back at school last Friday and made valentines cards for all his friends, and was excited to read through the valentines he brought home from his classmates.  (“They all know I like dinosaurs!?” he’d say each time he found one with a personalized dinosaur picture on it.)

On Sunday we took Ida on her first zoo adventure, and Lucas had a great time visiting the animals.  That evening he was so inspired by love that he kept trying to invent his own little sayings… like “I’m feeling hearts inside myself” and “love is surrounding us all.”  And it wasn’t just cliche Valentines love.  Lucas actually feels and expresses a lot of loving thoughts these days, especially for us.  It is humbling to the point of overwhelming sometimes to have our six year old — the same one we used to describe as “not very concerned with other people’s feelings” — unabashedly showering us with love.

So Lucas is doing amazingly well, and all the outpouring of love and support is certainly helping Burke and me recover from our short stint at the hospital.  Lucas’s sleep has been pretty bad over the past few days and thus we’re still feeling a little frayed from the whole ordeal.  So keep sending Lucas your emails and emojis, and visualize a good nights sleep for our whole family one of these days.