Life Changes

It's a go. After finally calling Cathy myself today around 11:30am I got word that my blood work came back fine exept for one little abnormality which didn't really mean much. The PTT was fine and Cathy said that she just needed to call Dr. Scandling and, "give me an hour and I'll call you back." I should have known better by now because after waiting for two hours, I called her. "Oh, I was just about to give you a call," she says. Sure you were. Anyway, Dr. Scandling said he didn't see any problems with anything.

Tomorrow we will call admitting around 9:30am to find out if they have a bed ready for Joaquin or when they will have a bed ready and when they want us to come in. Hopefully it won't be until later in the day, but who knows. Then I need to be there no later than 11:00am on Sunday morning. The surgery will take place Monday morning. I will go into surgery at 8:30am and Joaquin will go in at 10:00. Donor surgeries usually take about 3-4 hours and transplants around the the same time, but with an infant it will probably take a little longer.

I think by the time I finally heard that everything was fine and ready to go this afternoon, I was so annoyed and angry by the fact the Cathy does not ever call me back when she says she will that I didn't have the reaction I thought I would when we found out it was all good. Chris said he was a little emotional after I told him the news. I'm not sure what to feel at times. I feel excited sometimes, scared others. Which is all normal, I'm sure.

I was thinking this afternoon that life is about to change for us on August 28th. By this time next week Joaquin will have a good kidney and will still be in the hospital, but he will be done with dialysis. Got me thinking about how significant life changes happen to people daily - you could be in a car accident and suffer life altering injuries or you could be barely scraping by and win a $100 million dollar lottery. The difference for us is that we can see it coming - we know it's coming. Joaquin's birth and what we went through right afterward was life changing (like the birth of any child), but we had no idea what we were in store for - and somehow I feel like that made it easier for me to deal with it. But I also think it made it all go a lot slower. I'm hoping that since we know what is about to happen and we have a good idea about how long he'll be in the hospital for, it might make it go faster. And this time I'm able to approach being in the hospital differently. I don't like hospitals. I don't like nurses coming in every four hours to bug us (although I know it's their job.) I worry how Joaquin will react to the new environment, but it seems like everytime we go somewhere new I worry about how he'll react and he doesn't seem to notice - he takes it all in stride.

I also wanted to say that if there's anyone who you might think would like to keep up to date with all of our ongoings, then please pass this blog along to them. A few people have asked and I have no problem with it.