Not a whole lot to report. The torrential rain has kept us from doing much around the city, so we've kept to the house aside from a couple of errand trips. On Saturday D and her family continued work on the backyard, adding some bricks to our patio and setting up a new (beautiful) table and chair set. After the rain stops for more than a few hours, I'll take a picture and post it here.
D has a Mon/Wed/Fri schedule this week, but grades are due tomorrow so there'll be an additional Tuesday visit. I'll be in customer meetings on Thursday and Friday (at least). Fortunately they're both in San Diego, so I probably won't have any major trips until next week. Unless something unexpected comes up, we'll just be hanging around and waiting for the Lost premiere on Thursday. For those who don't know, we watch far too much TV, and I've been looking forward to the new Lost season for quite a while.
Aside from our usual TV viewing, I have a new addiction to Mythbusters (on the Discovery Channel), where two geeky engineers try to debunk common myths by recreating them in a scientific environment. In recent episodes they built a lead balloon, tried to make a robot surf on a wave caused by explosives detonating in a lake, and fired hundreds of rounds into a hanging pig carcass to re-create Hollywood action movie physics. We've also been watching The Complete Jane Austen on PBS....this week was Mansfield Park....and quite a bit of political news/debates/results coverage.
I think we've officially decided not to attend the Celebration of Life at Children's Hospital. I thank you all for your input, both on the blog and through email. One of the emails we received was from a friend who went through a very similar situation at Children's with her baby. After reading what she wrote for her Celebration of Life ceremony, I think the event would definitely be too emotional at this point. It was incredibly touching, but to go through that with twenty different families......well, I'd have to buy stock in Kleenex before attending. Fortunately, we can RSVP for any future ceremony and have Andrew added to the list, so we can go when we decide that we're ready for it.
About Me
- JR
- D's husband. Andrew's dad. Son, friend, cousin, nephew, grandson....the list goes on.
About This Blog
This blog was originally created to disseminate information about Andrew, our son who was born on June 15, 2007. Andrew was born with a congenital diaphragmatic hernia (CDH) that allowed abdominal organs (stomach, intestines, etc) to migrate into his chest cavity during development. This prohibited normal lung growth, making it difficult for him to live without significant life support, including a ventilator, a lung bypass machine called ECMO, and a long list of medications.
Andrew spent the next five months at Rady Children's Hospital in San Diego, undergoing multiple operations for the hernia repair, intestinal rearrangement, stomach tube insertion, etc. Multiple attempts to help him breathe on his own without a ventilator were unsuccessful due to a number of anatomical and developmental difficulties. Andrew's failure to progress and an abundance of overwhelmingly unfavorable test results led us to remove him from life support and let nature take its course on November 19, 2007.
We greatly appreciate the time we were able to spend with Andrew, and this blog continues as a source for information, a tribute to his memory, and a continuation of our lives without him present. From the emotional to the mundane, our lives have been forever changed by his presence; those lives are now chronicled here.
No comments:
Post a Comment