Happy Girl

Thank you for blessing us all with your beautiful comments...they mean so much to us.

My lack of frequent updating means the task of keeping Faith in her room has become frequently difficulty (a good problem to have).

Yesterday Faith came up from the PICU and is now on the 9th floor. :)

And now to the question you may have been wondering..

No monumental sounds yet...I have to say I was expecting Faith to be able fully vocalize once extubated, which has not been the case. We can hear some raspy very faint cries when she is upset, no other than that we are waiting.

She does however sound like Darth Vader. She has tons of secretions and will need to get used to clearing them on her own. We cannot deep suction because it might compromise the graft. Watching her labor to breathe has been difficult but we've been assured that this is par for the course.

ENT said it may take a few weeks for the swelling of her chords to subside. They also say we will know in two weeks if the graft has "took"and the reconstruction was successful (I know, I thought her breathing on her own meant it successful but as we know Faith is a sprinter).

And speaking of ENT, in the end our doc was right. If we stuck to the original plan, Faith would be weaning off sedation today. She was right when she said this approach means a much quicker recovery. In fact, Faith seemed to be at her best when she was off all heavy meds. For this, we are extremely grateful that we have a doc. who knows what she's doing and puts up with us. :)

We're hoping to get out of here sometime this week, which is just AMAZING!

Thanks for checking in,

Jen & CO