Tuesday May 1st, Getting Ready!

We had another super fun day today.  It started out with Physical Therapy then a visit with our Child Life Specialist to get Ingram (and me) ready to have his port accessed tomorrow for the first time.  I have got to tell you, I'm a little nervous about it.  Ingram does a really good job of helping us clean it at home by getting his supplies out and opening them and today, he was the lead doctor in the surgical implant of a port in Duke the Lion (our original animal from LeBonheur that received the IV before Ingram did).

We were finished at St. Jude before lunch so we headed off to visit his preschool class and take them pencils from St. Jude.  They were so excited that we were coming that his teachers postponed nap time till after we were there.  There were a couple in his class that just couldn't hang on and were begging to go to sleep.  Ingram had been drawing pictures for all of them and they had made a quilt with dinosaurs and photos of each of them that made me cry when he got it out of the bag.  We took a ton of pictures while we were there and the class picture (with the exception of the two sleepy heads) is below.

We also had a few visitors to the house and it's always fun when that happens!  I haven't even mentioned all the food that people have been bringing over for our meals; I can focus on Ingram and the girls rather than having to whip up a gourmet meal after getting home from the hospital.  It has truly been a life saver for us, especially since some days we don't even get out of St. Jude till 4 or 5 in the afternoon.  We feel so lucky to have such generosity thrown our way at such a crazy time.

Something else that was special today was having family pictures taken.  You have to understand, we're not the kind of people that did the newborn picture package where you take them every 3 months.  My parents have begged me before to get a real picture taken and even offered to pay for it, but did we do it?  Of course not!  We've taken real pictures only once as a family and they were called the "just in case pictures" 2 weeks before Craig had open heart surgery.  A lot has happened since then including the birth of little man himself and our good friend Julie took some great pictures this evening of all five of us.  She's going to post some on her blog and we'll put in her link when they're ready or you can check out her website at www.117photography.com whenever you like.  She's great and we love her; I've known her forever because she was my next door neighbor growing up and my sister's best friend.

So tomorrow is the official start to radiation.  I'm a little nervous about that too and we've been doing a lot to get ready for it.  Ingram already has started medicine to hopefully keep nausea at bay.  He'll actually take it 3 times a day for the rest of his 6 and a half weeks because once he starts getting nauseous, it's a lot harder to control.  We also have our supply of numbing cream and stickers to go on top of his port before they access it so that it hurts less.  We've been talking a lot about how his body needs medicine to help it and it seems to be working to make his less afraid but I guess we'll just see how tomorrow goes before we get too excited.  Of course, this doesn't mean that we want anyone to stop praying for him in this regard; he gets very anxious when the nurses come towards him with anything, especially something that looks shiny and sharp.

I guess, specific prayer requests as far as the radiation goes is that he tolerates the actual radiation, that he becomes less scared of his port being accessed and "messed with" on a daily basis, that we have a somewhat consistent time schedule, that he doesn't miss too many meals in a given day, and that we all, including the girls, handle his treatments well.  We know that he's not going to feel at his best, but we're hoping that he does okay with it and doesn't get too many bad side effects.  As far as meals go, he's sedated every day for radiation which means he can't eat until after he wakes up in recovery.  Poor little man had already lost weight from his original surgery and we want to feed him all the meals we can to help fatten him back up before he gets too scrawny or too sick to eat.  The girls are doing well and we continue to talk with them regularly; they really don't like to see their little man not feeling well.  The good part is that these past few days Ingram has been feeling good and we've had a ton of fun; tonight we even had ice cream at Baskin Robbins before we had our spaghetti dinner.  You got to love that!!

Oh My Have We Missed Our Friends in 2B!