It's starting to feel like Christmas

Today is was snowing all day - really pretty snow too.  The kind that clings to the trees.  For a while the snow looked like the fake snow in movies, it was so perfect.  For a while it was huge flakes meandering down, and later it was tiny flakes screaming down.  A little bit of everything!

After staying with Esther all morning, Daryl came over and we had lunch together.  Then we check on Esther again and got to talk with her cardiologist (the on working the CICU today).  She had a bad de-sat while I was there, and the Dr was on the phone.  She bottomed out to 50% O2 and just stayed there - she was looking a little blue even.  The nurse turned up the O2 until she came back up.  Esther had mistakenly been left on O2 at 30% all morning -she's not supposed to have O2 as it causes over-circulation due to her heart defects.  So once they took it off, it took hours for her body to adjust.  She kept desating every few minutes.  The Dr said to not give her Oxygen unless she stayed below 70% for more than 5 minutes.

After about an hour of repeated desatting, she finally started to stabilize and dropped to doing it only once in a while.  Now the drops are lower and shorter in duration, so that's a good trend.

Most of that happened while I was with my family.  I feel a little guilty now for leaving Esther, but she had not woken up at all yet.  She hasn't opened her eyes since early yesterday.  I miss her bright eyes and smile!  She's actually mildly desatting now, but only down into the 60s and it only lasted about 15 seconds.  She just woke up while I was editing this paragraph, and complained for a while, so I got to hold her and we had some nice cuddle time.  Then she fell back to sleep and is sleeping peacefully in her bed now.

So what was I doing while I was away?  I was doing some very important activities!   First we celebrated Elizabeth's birthday (it was the 12th), and she got a little ark and play animals/people.  She loved it!  Then we had cake,  and sang "Happy Birthday" to her - she just ate it up!



We had a little boy that Rebekah got to know yesterday join us for this, but he told us "I can't have sugar or unsaturated fats" - he's just 5 years old and it was soooo cute! He has had cancer twice now, and by eliminating certain foods, the likelihood of the cancer returning is reduced. I asked if he could have an apple, and his mother OK'd that, so he enjoyed an apple while we ate the cake. Then he took a deep breath and said, "I love the smell of cake" - how sweet is that! You can see this little guy sitting next to Dayton.

Then Jessica started wrapping the goody bag gifts (she loves doing this, I just hold out her items and she does the rest), while I mixed up the cookie dough and helped the kids cut out the cookies.

Then once the cookies were cooked, we started decorating:

They had a lot of fun, but I had to go up to the room and put my foot up - the shopping yesterday, and then baking today made my foot intensely painful. I laid down and took a short nap, and then returned to the hospital.
So I had a great day, and I'm so pleased that Esther is looking and acting so much better. All her stats are improving, and her diarrhea seems to be nearly gone - her last poopy diaper looked almost normal!
Now we are trying to find out about her surgery, and if she'll be going back to the floor, or stay in ICU until surgery. They are not full now, so that might be the case.

I just found out that she will be going back on the floor tomorrow - that's good and bad.  They were threatening to take my sleeper
Well, that's all for tonight! I'll blog again tomorrow and hopefully we'll have a good idea of when she'll be having her surgery!