RAWR! Halloween in the Hospital.

Cutest. Halloween Costume. Ever. Plain and simple.

I have been away from the blog while Liam is back in the hospital. He's doing very well and at this point we are simply biding our time until he finishes a treatment. The five day course of inhaled antibiotics can't be given at home so we must wait until Friday before going home. Yesterday Liam was moved out of the ICU though which is a good thing. The Docs decided that he was less likely to catch something really serious (the true fear of coming to the hospital) up on the normal floor rather than in the ICU. Liam is comfortable and sleepy.

Liam's first Halloween was as fun as it could be in the hospital. We put him in his costume and had many nurses visit and take pictures. He was the best dressed baby in the unit. He had fun and so did his mom and I. The costume will be used again during his jungle themed first birthday party.

One of the worst parts about being in the ICU is the closeness to all the other patients. Not closeness in terms of distance but in the camaraderie and bond that is formed between families nearly instantly. Its a small and exclusive club; one that no one really wants to be a part of. Since you can only understand what this is like if you have experienced it your fellow patients families can be a comfort with only a head nod or a wave. And so it stands to reason that if one family has a truly terrible day, we all do. It is very hard to distance yourself from feeling that it just as easily could have been my kid rather than theirs that had to go through this or that. I don't want to get into specifics out of respect for every other PICU family but this stay has been very hard in that regard.

I thought that I would have all sorts of insights into our day to day life in the hospital now that we are back but it is so mind numbingly routine that there really isn't anything to tell. Liam sleeps, and eats, and poops, and not much else. We are constantly visited by respiratory therapists, nurses, doctors, physical therapists, and housekeepers. There isn't much to do other than hold Liam and read to him which I do most of the time I am with him. The TV only has a few channels most of which we don't watch. The windows to the room truly give a fishbowl feeling. As if all of the families are part of a big aquarium for the docs. I keep tripping over the bubbling treasure chest and Karin still finds enjoyment in swimming through the skull's eye.


Side Note about being in a private room at a Children's Hospital: Its hard not to feel like Gulliver when going to the bathroom on a toilet about 8 inches off the floor.

Stuck in another 'groundhog day' only instead of a new day to relive over and over we get to go back to an old one. As if the last 30 days never happened. Liam is back in the hospital. 911 had to be called and Liam and his mother got to ride in an ambulance with the sirens on and everything. The EMT would have shown them all the cool gadgets back there if he wasn't so busy keeping Liam alive. It was a rough day. But by the afternoon when Liam had calmed down and fallen asleep it wasn't so bad. Living in a hospital is a lot like riding a bike. It already feels like we never left. It is routine. It is comfortable. It is sad.


Liam was brought to the ICU due to respiratory distress. Chest films show some excess fluid in the lungs making his breathing more labored. He was unable to keep his oxygen saturation up high enough (partly due to the pain he was in because of teething) and both his heart rate and respiratory rates were elevated even as he slept. Karin and I are very well trained on what looks like something that can be treated and home and what constituted a trip to the hospital. We knew what we had to do and were quick to call 911 and get Liam the help he needed. Getting him into the car seat and getting him ready for transport made him more agitated and by the time he was put in the back of the ambulance he was a deep, deep, blue color. Scary, scary stuff; just in time for Halloween. That Liam sure does know how to celebrate a fake holiday. Little prankster, I'll give you a trick or treat.

We called the ICU unit on the way so they could call the E.R. and have us immediately transferred there. They know us there and are better equipped to deal with Liam's equipment and diagnosis. He was put on a very big, very fancy ventilator and quickly calmed down. His color returned to normal and within 5 minutes in true Liam fashion he fell asleep in the trauma room as if the whole event had simply bored him to sleep.

We are hashing out exactly what caused this but it doesn't look to be anything serious. When Liam catches a cold, this is what happens. When Liam catches Pneumonia, this is what happens. When Liam catches seasonal allergies, this is what happens. When Liam is perfectly happy and stable and some tiny little thing gets caught in his throat, THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS. It can be hard to explain to people how a five or six day stay in the Intensive Care Unit can be no big deal but for Karin and I it has become downright ordinary.

Cultures were drawn and sent off to the lab. Regardless of how Liam is doing (he is doing wonderfully right now. Calm, comfortable, and back to normal) we are stuck here until they can be absolutely sure that nothing will grow out. Its been over 24 hours now and nothing has grown yet but we have to give it at least 36 more. H1N1, RSV, Flu A, and Flu B swabs were all sent to the CDC but without a fever or a change in his secretions that diagnosis seems unlikely. We won't hear about those results for a day or two.

Liam is doing well and surprisingly so are his mother and I. We have dreaded our first visit back knowing it was inevitable but the anticipation, as it always does, proved to be worse than the event itself. It was almost nice to come into the hospital to be greeted by plenty of familiar and friendly faces. People who had already cared for Liam and were knowledgeable of not only his medical history but also how he behaves. It is very tiring to explain Liam's likes and dislikes to new nurses. What positions help him sleep, what his daily routine consists of and what will really piss him off. This kid's got a temper you do not want to mess with.

So we'll muddle through the next few days. Biding our time until real life can start again. Hours spent watching Law & Order reruns on the hospital TV and reading fluffy easy to read novels. Nothing you have to think about, thinking can be too much at times like this.

The Way He Was.

I'm tired. Very tired. Today was my first day back at work since Liam came home. A long day for sure. Way too tired to post something real so I'll leave you with one of my favorite pictures of Liam when he was only a few weeks old. This is during something called "kangaroo care" or skin-to-skin holding. A wonderful bonding time between mom and preemie. Beneficial for them both.

My little monkey.

Night all.

Pictures? Why, of course I have pictures of my son.

Hello internets. Been too busy or tired post but I have taken a few pictures. It has been a great few days. Thursday was a wonderful day including a fantastic Neurological evaluation for Liam by his doctors from the Follow-Up Clinic. ( I'll get into it in a post dedicated to it but Liam has a chromosomal imbalance which has resulted in Miller Dieker Syndrome. His brain didn't complete its development and he will experience developmental delays for all of his life.) News that had The Wife and I happy enough to dance. I got a ton of things done around the house. Things that should have gotten done over the summer but need to get done before the winter. I ran into a dear old friend that I haven't seen in 12 years and had a great dinner hanging out with my parents. It was fun for the whole family.




Liam continues to do well except for a sore stomach all day today which made him quite irritable as well as effecting his respiratory function. When your bloated with gas your lungs can't expand as much. When your lungs can't expand enough your respiratory rate gets higher. When your respiratory rate gets higher your ventilator doesn't like it and beeps and beeps. Oh how I love the beeping. Anyway, he's a tough cookie and so a sore tummy isn't gonna keep my boy down long. We adjusted his meds to compensate and we'll talk to the pediatrician on Monday.


I realize now that while I have talked about Liam and his current issues so much that I never posted any pictures here of where he started. Let's fix that shall we. . .

That's him the morning after he was born. All 770grams (1lb 110z) of him. Looks a bit different at 18.5 pounds doesn't he?


Watched the movie Year One tonight. It was barely OK. The Biblical gimmicks were slightly funny but could have been much more clever. Fart jokes have their place and I guess somewhere there's people who find eating poo funny but I'm not one of them.

I am surprised by how funny the show Community has been. Consistently getting many more belly laughs from me than The Office or 30 Rock. Even Chevy Chase is funny on this show. That's saying something.

The E! Network has been showing Chasing Amy all weekend and it cracks me up how bad the ADR substitutions for the cuss words are in this.

The second volume of The Complete Sandman was better than the first. Can't wait for my email from the library that the 3rd and 4th are in. Palahnuik's new one Pygmy is a bit of a struggle. The first person narrator of a Chinese exchange student who doesn't know much English makes it hard to follow. I'll push through it though because the story has grabbed me. Reading Coraline to Liam and he is loving it.

With the belly issue today I wasn't able to take my usual Saturday Nap so its off to bed for me and hopefully all three of us will get a few hours. Night All.

But Feathers Drift.

I didn't get scared until I saw just how much blood it was. Big drops all over the top of the small table and a large clump leaves. The ground around the table was splattered in crimson dotted leaves. All but the deep spots were dried up but it was a hot day today and they could have dried pretty quickly. We had been walking around my Nan's yard for at least fifteen minutes by now but she hadn't yet come out to see my father and I. I hadn't walked around the front of the house to see if her car was there but it wasn't in the driveway around back of her corner lot.

My father noticed it first. He was so excited to show me the table he had placed in front of the toolshed that he wanted to give for my garage. "Shit, does that look like blood to you?" he said as I walked closer.

"I've never really seen blood this dried out but it sure looks like blood to me." I looked closer and closer at the table before inspecting the ground around its legs. There was more than I thought.

" I hope my Mom didn't cut herself. I'm gonna get my keys and head inside. Don't touch any of this stuff. Leave it all just the way it is now." He backed away and headed for the van. "Hopefully there's some coffee on." he called back but it sounded like he was just trying to keep me (and maybe a bit of himself) calm.

He ran inside and I looked for a trail of drops leading away from the table. Nothing. The drops seemed to come from straight up. No direction as if someone were swinging a cut hand. Perfect little circles of dark red. It just seemed so strange to see so much blood in one little spot but not anywhere else. I didn't want my father to know it but I was beginning to get very scared that something had happened here. The longer it took him to "get his coffee" the more afraid I became.

"Hey Eric, there is a pot of coffee in there if you want to grab a cup." Dad said calmly as he came out through the back sliding glass doors.

"Nan home?" I said in the most nonchalant voice I could muster.

"No, there's no one home but everything looks fine in there." He said looking at the ground as he came towards me. He stopped over a bowl on the ground and said "but now I'm seeing this here."

I walked towards the small cereal bowl on the ground and could see that it was filled with a red chunk of something and had some thick red liquid smeared allover its sides. "What the hell is that?" I said just before getting close enough to see that it was a meatball covered in marinara sauce. Dad's sister liked to feed the neighborhood animals. I suppose she meant it to be for the cats that lived on the block but it attracted all kinds of course.

"Something could have eaten that and climbed into that tree and shit it out all over there." he said but I think we both new this didn't look like any kind of animal waste we had ever seen. Marinara sauce or no. "I'm sure everything's fine. Let's unload the van." We opened the van and brought one heavy load to the bike shed in the corner of the yard. Not being able to help ourselves we wandered back over to the table to get to the bottom of this. "It doesn't make much sense for it to come from straight up. The drips on the sides of the table were long and thin. It was on all four sides. Surely unless someone was standing on the tabletop at the time it couldn't have come from someone cutting themselves.

"You know what? I think it was probably a hawk or something up in the top of the tree eating something. A bird, squirrel, anything really. There's been a peregrine falcon flying around here this summer." We were both craning our necks to look straight up to see the criss-cross of branches above us. "Now we just have to find some feathers around here and we'll know."

Made perfect sense to me so we started looking around for feathers but didn't find a one. I started to feel better. There had to be a reasonable explanation for this but you never could tell with Nan. She wasn't one to let you know if she was sick or in pain. Letting other people know, even the ones who helped care for her, would be an imposition. I walked round the table and between it and the tool shed when it hit me. There's blood everywhere on the ground except for under the roof overhang of the shed. It was then easy to tell that the blood had to come from higher than that. Nan is spry for her age but with two artificial knees and one artificial hip she's not climbing any trees. Even if they are titanium.

My mind set at ease we got back to work and finished the unloading of the van. We got to my house a little while later and started telling my wife what happened. My father was so excited to tell her since she is such a fan of true crime documentary TV. No CSI I for her but a steady diet of Forensic Files, The First 48, Cold Case Files, and American Justice, makes Karin a self-proclaimed crime scene evidence expert. When she heard about the long straight up and down drips on the side of the table she quickly exclaimed "That must have come from very high up, there's no way it had anything to do with Nan." Apparently it had cleared some guy of his wife's murder and Karin was adamant that even though we haven't yet seen her Nan was fine and not without a significant amount of blood.

"I still wish we had found some feather's so we could be sure." Dad said. He didn't look worried but there was something unfamiliar in his voice when he said it. And it wasn't until then that I realized why we didn't

"Well that's easy to explain," I said "blood will fall straight down of course . . ." It's not every day that I get to ease my father's worry by figuring something out before him. He's a pretty clever fellow.

". . . but feathers drift." I made a wavy motion with my hands implying feathers floating in a breeze.

"Well Shit. Why the hell didn't I think of that." He said with a smile.

We let my wife get back to washing the dishes as we spent the gorgeous day doing work on the outside of my house before winter comes. It turned out to be a really great day for me and the whole family but it started with a jolt of worry and concern. Fear mixed with intrigue and puzzlement. My Nan is fine of course but I didn't find that out until the evening. We still don't know exactly where the blood came from but we have a pretty good idea and I don't want to know the real explanation if it means that we're wrong.


Update: This story is how I started my thursday. I wrote it up that night to post but Blogger went down while I tried to post. I haven't had the time to post since and so here it is being posted on a saturday night.

No Photos

No photos this time I'm afraid. Haven't taken many in the last few days. We've been a bit busy. Liam went to see his pediatrician yesterday and we found that he is now officially in a spot on the growth curve that correlates to his age! A huge milestone for any preemie. He weighs so much in fact that he has been put on a diet. 18.5 pounds! We've got some skin rash issues including him breaking out into hives this morning but its nothing a bit of ointment and cream can't get rid of.

Liam was visited today be his first friend aside from his mother and I. The first nurse Liam ever had came over to the house to hold him for a while. Caitlin was a huge part of Liam's first 5 months and as such has become a part of the family. She is welcome any time and we were sad to hear of her plans to move to San Diego next year. At least we'll have a place to stay when we take Liam out there to see the San Diego Zoo right?

Finished The Graveyard Book the other day and forgot to mention how much I enjoyed it. As I've said before it's a very fun read and by the last chapter I almost cried. ( I cry alot these days and I'm man enough to admit it. It has been an emotional year.) Although I loved the story of Bod and his childhood in the graveyard I was taken by the story of Silas, his guardian. I am sure that I am not alone in that opinion. I have read people reviewing the book calling for a sequel but I tend to think that the story is just about perfect as it is. It may even get me to read some more YA fiction and find out what else I've been missing out on in that. Because it is written for someone a bit younger doesn't mean the story doesn't have merit.

I'm also on to volume 2 of The Sandman and loving that. out of 11 volumes I don't think I'm far enough along to comment on the themes and plots of the series but I like what I've seen so far.

I sometimes find myself with too much to read and so start immersing myself into more than one book at a time. A book for reading in the morning and another that I read before bed for example. To that end I grabbed Chuck Palahniuk's newest novel Pygmy from the library today. I never read Fight Club but I hear this one is even better. I did read Rant and found it interesting but it took a while to warm up to Palahniuk's writing style in that one. I also thought that some of the more gruesome things put into his fiction are there simply to shock and titillate and not to further character or plot. Small sample size though and we'll see how I like this new one.

I almost picked up Infinite Jest at the library as well but I know that I'm just not ready for that yet. It's an enormous undertaking if I want to really do it right.

If you're not watching Bored to Death on HBO you are missing something great. While Silverman holds the lead well it's Zack Galifinakis an Ted Danson who just kill me on every episode. Ted's best role since Sam Malone that is for sure.

While googling Zack Galifianakis to figure out how to spell his name I found his show Between Two Ferns on Funnyordie.com. This is some funny shit.

Liam just fell asleep and the ventilator noise is getting hypnotic. Time to get some shut eye. Night all.

17 Days

17 days. Yesterday marked the 17th day that Liam was home. Its the longest he's ever been out of a hospital as the last time he came home we were rushed back to the ICU on the 16th day. We celebrated as a family by spending the whole day in our pajamas. It is truly a remarkable thing to not have to change out of our pajamas to see our son. My parents came over in their jammies in the afternoon and my sister paid attention to the dress code when she came over to watch the patriots kick ass/ do some laundry. We got a whole bunch of chinese food delivered and spent the afternoon and early evening taking turns holding the boy and reading to him and chatting about him. It was a wonderful celebration of his homecoming.


Our nurse arrived at 11:00pm and The Wife and I got to sleep in the bed at the same time last night. Also an occasion to be celebrated. A busy day tomorrow for sure with a pediatricians appointment followed by his evaluation for early intervention (physical therapy/ occupational therapy / speech pathology ). Hopefully all three of us will be able to squeeze in a nap in the afternoon. We'll see.


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Alright, if you decide to come back and regularly read this blog you will eventually notice that I will link to a bunch of stuff that I find on Kottke.org. I can't help it if the guy just continues to find the coolest stuff on the internet. Check out this amazing clip of a woman on Ukraine's Got Talent depicting the German invasion of of the Ukraine during WWII using sand and a lightbox. Using her hands and a whole bunch of sand this woman had the whole audience crying in just a few minutes. Simply amazing.

Like I said busy day tomorrow so its off to bed, or actually - the couch, for a few hours before trading places with The Wife who gets the first shift in the bed. Night all.