T-minus one night

Tomorrow morning, Ellie goes in for her next surgery. We hope that this will be her last go 'round with the operating room, but we understand that there are some short gut kids who have many surgeries to fix and tinker with their plumbing over the years. Still, we hope that this does the trick.

She is scheduled to go in around 10 tomorrow morning and the OR is booked for 5 hours, so by mid-afternoon, we expect her to be on the road to recovery. There is some uncertainty related to how she recovers and where. We hope that she will have surgery under an epidural and will come back here to her room afterwards without a load of narcotics in her system that she will need to process. If she needs narcotics, she will likely go to the ICU afterward and spend some days there while she recovers.

Either way we are set for the next step and understand that the next few weeks will suck for us compared to the relatively good life that we have been leading for the last few weeks.

We may not be able to hold her for a while. This will be tough for her and for us since we both dig holding her.

She may be back in an isolette bubble for a few days. Touching your baby through portholes sucks too.

So to get ready for this we spent the day hanging out with Ellie and doing all of the stuff that we like to do with her:

Holding her so she can show us how strong her neck is:





















Taking her out in the garden to see the sunshine:















And taking a nap with her all wrapped up and unhooked from the wires that will come tomorrow:




















Yes, the onesie is a custom made job from Abby's friends. It says 'I kick short gut butt'





















We're doing alright and are remarkably calm considering what lies ahead for us in the next few days and weeks. We just remind ourselves that we have a great suregon who doing surgery that we are comfortable with and that we are moving the ball forward. At the goal line is home and taking our baby out to sit on our lawn.

Abby is in the hospital tonight and I am leaving soon to get a night's sleep before coming back early in the AM to get ready for the big day. Althoughwe appreciate the advice to go shopping that someone with a short gut baby posted yesterday, we will probably be here for the duration. My sisters brought all sorts of magazines today for us to flip the pages of and not really read as we wait.

More to come from the road to recovery.