The next step

Thank you all so much for your prayers for Levi and our family! Those of you that are on facebook know that Wednesday’s procedure went well. We got there and Levi started getting a little nervous and was just uneasy. He was doing pretty good really until the moment I started taking his shoes off…. My poor baby was terrified! I have never seen him so hysterical, but really, if I thought that I was getting ready to go through the same thing again, I would have been doing the same thing! There is this miracle drug that they always have offered but that we had never needed. We had to wait to give it to him about 15 minutes before they took him back. Thankfully, everyone was not only on time but actually ahead of time! There was no calming him down but once he got that medicine… well… he was pretty happy! He did get a little nervous when he looked up and there were 10 medical people surrounding him. He was scheduled to go back at 3:15 but by 3:00 we were done! It was amazing. The doctor said everything looked great and even better than he expected. He wanted to see the rib graft still be white, because the stent was there there was really no room for it to heal. A yellow color would have been really bad, it would have meant that the graft was ‘dead’. But instead, he saw a little bit of red going through the back, and that meant that blood was starting to flow through it! The other one was nice and white. It felt so good to see the Doctor walking in the waiting room with a big smile! He did really well waking up and by 4:20 we were on our way home!
Immediately after surgery we noticed an enormous difference with his swallowing. He has been doing incredible! He was only a couple ounces lighter when they weighed him at the hospital(that was an answer to prayer and the only way I was going to keep the nutritionist off my back!), but these last couple of days he was been eating better than he ever has before! He also has started talking again, although he will only whisper. I don’t know if he doesn’t realize that he can talk louder, or if the fact that he’d been unable to make any sounds for three weeks made him forget how to speak in more than just a whisper. Anyway, it’s good that he’s talking and maybe once we start speech therapy he will start speaking up!
We already have our next two procedures scheduled, this Thursday at 4 pm and then the 28th at the same time. The Doctor wants to see continued healing and make sure that everything is moving in the right direction. And they will be removing the new scar tissue that shows up. They use a laser to remove it and it’s not very invasive.
Thank you all so much for your prayers! It’s hard to believe that we are so close to being free from the trach!!!