The Luckiest Unlucky

Sorry I have totally neglected the blog. Sometimes life speeds along and it takes awhile for me to catch back up with it. On Father's Day my little prince fell into a bush. We took him to emergency thinking he would just need some stitches, but a CT scan and a few minutes later they were life flighting him up to Primary Children's Medical Center, the local children's hospital. They discovered that a stick had entered above his eye, followed along side the optic nerve, and had weaved itself through his brain narrowly missing his carotid arteries, and then just stopped short of his brain stem. The next few hours seemed like an eternity. Sitting in that empty OR waiting room, I prepared myself for the worst and thought of everything he'd never be able to do again. They prepared us for the likely posssibility that they would have to open up his skull to retrieve the stick, but they assured us that they had a surgeon who specialized in cutting the skull, another whose job it was to stop the potential bleeding, they had a specialist for every possible thing that could have gone wrong. Luckily, we didn't have to use most of them. Miraculously, his doctors were able to pull the stick out of the original wound without causing further injury. 

After we made it through surgery, it became a waiting game to see what would go wrong. Everyone was sure something would. Serious head injuries like this just didn't happen without devastating or fatal ramifications. We watched the families of some of our PICU neighbors with heart wrenching stories say their goodbyes. Fortunately, our luck continued. We were able to take him off all of the breathing tubes, and the first words out of his mouth was, "I want my Mama!" One of the best sentances I've ever heard in my life. His wound stopped leaking CSF fluid from the brain.  He was able to move all of his limbs. We moved out of the PICU to the Nuero-Trauma Unit. After about a week or so, we were finally released from the hospital ahead of schedule. (We were originally told we'd be there a minimum of 21 days.) We had weekly visits from Home Health, gave him a heavy dose of antibiotics every 8 hours through his PICC line, and he continued to make his miraculous recovery. The little guy somehow managed to escape all infections and pretty much made a full recovery.

The past few months have been such a whirlwind for me, and I can't truly put into words how I feel. It amazes me how quickly life can change, and most often during such ordinary moments. It's incredible how frail and  powerful life can be in the same instant. We truly are some of the luckiest unlucky people. It was so touching to see all of the support we were given. Often times from people we didn't even really know. I can't thank everyone enough for all of your thoughts and prayers. They truly worked miracles for us. Thank you! This has been such an incredible experience. Hopefully things are starting to return back to normal and I can return to some of my usual activities again, like blogging. While this pretty much ruled our Summer, I do have a few more things I want to try and post soon. Thanks again for all the love and support--he is still doing great!