Tuesday, June 06, 2006

Abby's view from the Penthouse

Well I thought it was just Gib and I who considered our daughter to be the cutest baby in the hospital. But today she just got booked to be on featured on the new tomorrow to help with fundraising for the hospital.

She is also booked for Friday, they are doing some big press thing to recognize the women who knit for the babies of Children’s hospital. We don’t need any blankets that are knitted by these women because Ellie has the Nervous Needles of Maine and New Hampshire to keep her warm, but they want us to be the family to be photographed receiving a blanket for the press. I always thought she was beautiful but I thought I might be a bit biased.

So I’m at the hospital tonight, I don’t mind staying here with her, she is really starting to recognize Gib and I and she is happy to spend hours just staring at us.

We now have four hours of free time every afternoon when she is off the juice. We try to spend most of this time out of the room and roaming the hospital. I now know every communal space in the hospital almost every plant in the garden.

Being in Boston for as long as we have, we have become part of a community of hospital families. It was nice in the beginning because I knew a few other families on the floor and had some one to talk to as we roamed. But after their considerable stays (up to 7 months in one case) they all have been discharged and have gone home. Every once and awhile they come back due mostly to complications or infections. I know it is dark but, I am happy to see them back. I want them to go home and have normal lives but it is nice to see a friendly face in the hallway other than the nurses. We are the old hands here and all I see in the hall are new parents looking very shell shocked by their new lives.

With Ellie’s upcoming surgery we will move yet again. We are looking at either a day in the recovery room and then back here or more likely we will spend a few days in the ICU and then move back down here and into a shared room again.

This will give us a chance to meet new people and the nurses say they will do as much as they can to get us back into a private room as soon as possible.

Then, hopefully, the door.

Abby

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