Road to recovery...

Hi everyone,
First I want to give a big thanks to Jackie who has been posting all the updates for us - thank you so much. It was such a relief to know everyone was staying informed without us being on the phone all day. Next I want to thank everyone else for all of your thoughts and prayers - they are working and we are in what our surgeon said was a "best case scenario" right now. Lila gave us a run for our money during the induction, taking her good old time to meet us despite me being on Pitocin for 18+ hours, but I am convinced she just wanted to pick her name for us. We went to the hospital with 3 names we liked, planning to pick when we met her. Well, she made it easy for us to pick - Lila means "born at night" and "dark haired beauty." I said I only wanted to use that name if she was born at night (not something we anticipated based on when my induction was started) and so she made it easy when she decided to make her appearance. Rose was Tom's grandma's name so that is how the middle name came about.

I was discharged this morning and made my way over to Children's with Tom's parents and Brody where Tom had spent the night. Lila continues to do well in that her abdomen is not too swollen or distended. She is still intubated so a machine is breathing for her, but that is the first goal to get her off that, hopefully within the next 2 days. She will start on TPN tomorrow (the IV feeds) through the central line that was placed during her surgery. Our surgeon, Dr. Burns, was fantastic (thank you again Ann Marie) and has been great at communicating everything that is happening/going to happen with us. He even called me from the operating room last night at 2:30am to tell me he was able to do a primary repair. So far, everything has been going in our favor and we pray that continues as Lila makes all the steps she needs to come home. Before we can start oral feeds, she needs to show us that all the bile has cleared from her stomach/intestines by having her naso-gastric (NG) tube run clear, meaning that everything is moving downward in the right direction instead of coming up. We don't know when that will be, but we are hoping soon. We will be able to hold her again once she is extubated so we are anxiously awaiting that. I will post pictures as soon as I can upload them to a computer.

Thank you again to everyone - we can't say enough how much all the support has meant to us.

Love,
Tom, Emily, Brody, and Lila