Life in the ICU

Baby Norman right before surgery

Now that we've moved past the anxiety of waiting, now we have the anxiety of the ICU.  A roller coaster ride of beeps, suctions, watching, and cleaning.  The baby is in a forced comatose state now, and on a respirator, because they are concerned how strong his lungs are considering all the non-oxygenated blood that he was breathing for the past three weeks.  (Thats part of the reason why they wanted to rush to do the surgery and not wait longer).  So now they put him on a respirator, let the lungs relax, and then they will slowly find a time to test the lungs and see how he is doing.

Some good news is that nothing went wrong during the surgery, and we were shocked as to how quickly he came out.  We were expecting to not hear anything until 4pm, but we got a call at 115pm to come speak to the doctor.  (They said everything was fine, but they wanted to speak to us.  The phone call was a minor heart attack for us, but everything was fine! ).

And now we are in the ICU.  They gave us a tour when we got here.  Besides the respirator, the baby is on several medications, one of which is adrenalin for the heart to get it pumping well.  Some are pain medications and some are ... other stuff.  I wasn't taking notes!  It was a lot to handle!  He has three main tubes coming out of him along with a catheter.  There is a nurse assigned to him and she is working on him now.  Her name is Soha.  She's nice.

 They will suction his breathing every hour or two, since while he is on a respirator he can't clear out the mucus himself.  That leads to alarms once the respirator is taken out.  The automatic medicine machines are constantly monitored, and some beep when the battery runs low, or whatever power line they are getting.  I can see, this is going to be an exciting time.

We will likely be sleeping in the apartment tonight, since there isn't really anything we can do right now away.

Thank you to everyone for your prayers and learning.
Thank you to my wonderful family for taking care of my kids while Fraidy and I are out.
Thank you to HaShem for watching over and taking care of our baby.

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