We're free!!!

before...

AFTER!!!!!

We escaped from the hospital!  Today has been a day of really good news and it feels really great to be back home with our healthy son.  We took Dallin to Children's Hospital this morning at 6:00am for a heart catheterization.  Because they needed to sedate him for the procedure, he wasn't allowed to eat anything past 3:30am.  For a hungry boy that eats every 2 hours, this was hard!  He did really well and slept until we got to the hospital, but with all the nurses checking his vitals and everything, he was wide awake and very aware of his empty stomach.  We talked to the cardiologist that would be performing the procedure and he told us all about what would be happening, what they expected to do, and what could go wrong.  The plan was to do another echo to see what they were dealing with and then to go ahead with the cath.  The Anethesiologist also talked to us and told us what could go wrong.  All the talk of what could go wrong sure makes you feel good before turning your son over to strangers and leaving him!  But we did it.  We took Dallin into this huge room full of millions of dollars worth of machines with a huge table in the middle; all for one tiny person.  They gave us a pager that would beep when they were all finished with him.  And then we waited.  Mckay's brother Evan was in Wyoming only a few hours away for a job, so he came to Salt Lake to be with us.  It was so great having him there, to help calm Dallin down, and to talk with and entertain us while we waited.

A few hours later the pager beeped and we went to talk to the doctor.  He said that after doing the echo with him sedated and totally calm, they got a really good look at his heart and he said that the valve looked fine.  It is narrower than normal, but it's nothing that will be a problem, and his heart will grow and fix itself in a matter of months.  So they didn't even do the cath and we could see him as soon and he was awake.  He wouldn't need the oxygen anymore and we just need to come back for a follow up appt. in 6 months.  The doctor said that as soon as we got him eating and looking good, we could leave and take him home with nothing more than a little prick from his IV.  I think at that moment I felt so relieved and incredibly happy.  After all the stuff we had to go through with other doctors, all the waiting, the worrying, the oxygen, our son is just fine.  We got to go see him and feed him (yay food!).  Other than seeing him for the first time when he was born, this was the happiest I'd ever been to see him and hold him again.  They took his IV out and we walked out of the hospital by 10:30am, with a happy baby, 2 relieved parents, and a wonderful supportive uncle.

We feel so blessed to have him back home and perfectly fine.  Even though we were only gone for the morning, it feels like he's been a different person for the past 4 weeks with the oxygen on.  He was cranky, gassy, he didn't sleep as well, and he just didn't like having a "face leash."  Now we have our son back and we can go back to life as normal.  As much as I hated having him on oxygen, I really think that it helped, along with an additional 4 weeks of life, to strengthen his valve and let his body heal itself.  And I know that all our family and friends who prayed for him helped as well.  We're looking forward to getting rid of the oxygen tanks and not worrying about him anymore, so we can think about other things.  Like my sister Katie having her baby really soon!