Day 3 - Preparing ourselves for surgery

Well, it's official, surgery tomorrow! We're such a ball of emotions. Happy that the doctors say he's stable enough to do surgery so soon, excited to be getting on with the process, scared to death about the whole thing and a thousand other feelings running through our minds.

The surgeon, Dr. Lal, came and spoke to us today and go over the different potential scenarios. Whether he'll be able to do it thoroscopically (best case) or have to do an open incision. Whether he'll need to use a gortex patch or whether there will be enough of Jonah's own diaphram to close it (best case). How much lung will there be on the left side and how much organs are up in the chest. We met the anesthesiologist as well and his fellow. They plan to use Fentynal during the surgery and afterwards to keep him sedated so he doesn't fight the ventilator. They also started his photo therapy under the billy lights as he is marginally jaundice. I'll include a photo of him under these lights a bit later, I didn't take one the first day as we still didn't have a camera until nighttime. My husband made the trip home to cut the grass, collect the mail and get the maternity bag we packed (but hadn't started carrying with us in the car yet).

One nice thing that the nurses did that ended up putting me to tears was insist that they would let my husband and I hold him before surgery. They insisted that after surgery it would be too painful for him but I read a completely different message into it. For right or wrong, I read that they were giving us a chance to hold him...in case he didn't make it. It brought me to tears and I was all by myself that day with him so I just held him and cried and cried. I told Jonah to be strong and do exactly what the surgeon and doctors asked him to do. I promised him that it wouldn't always be like this, wires and tubes and pain, that there was a beautiful home waiting for him when we got out of here. My husband didn't get back to the hospital till after 9pm but as soon as he got there we asked the nurses to let him hold Jonah and took the first of many photos on our camera. Below is Jonah with his dad holding him for the first time on Day 3. You can see that its a bit nerve wracking at first, but the nurses were supportive of it and once we calmed down Jonah usually went to sleep and satted very well (his numbers stayed constant or improved a bit).