So that was April

It's been a while since I last updated this blog. Since I last wrote, Magnus:

-Turned 5 months old (on the 19th)

-Figured out to roll from back to front and front to back

-Finally figured out how to do a push-up

-Tried his first solid food (rice cereal mixed with breastmilk...not a great hit)

and most importantly

-Has been very healthy and grown a lot!

Magnus is still a very skinny boy, but he's finally passed the 5 kilo mark, and is continuing to gain about an ounce a day. He's also getting taller and is growing out of a lot of his clothes these days, which means he's also growing into a lot of the cute outfits people got us when he was born.

We had a cardiology appointment yesterday, and everything looked good: his oxygen sats were good, his heart and lungs sounded good, and his cardiologist said we could decrease his medication further, so now he's only on one dose of diuretic per day. His next cardiology appointment will be in early June, and that one will be a bit more involved. He'll have to have some bloodwork done, as well as an echocardiogram and an EKG. So, that's not going to be any fun, but if everything still looks good, our next appointment after that won't be for another 3 months!

So really, everything is going about as well as we could possibly hope. Despite that, I still worry a lot. I worry about what will happen with Magnus's health in the future, and I worry that his growth and developmental delays (though extremely minor) will translate to problems later in life. And everything we've been through has left Iggy and myself both a little bit raw. We find ourselves becoming emotional at random moments (like last week, when the Stevie Wonder song "Overjoyed" started playing on my iPod and I had to skip it because I was about to start crying. In fact, just thinking about it now makes me feel like crying!)

But despite all that, life feels pretty good these days. Magnus is mostly a pretty happy boy and he smiles and laughs often. He loves being kissed and tickled and sung to. Everything we've been through has been totally worth it.

Back home

As expected, we got the all-clear to go home around 8 a.m. However, we ended up not leaving until around 11 because of various administrative stuff that I will not bother to go into. But Magnus had a very nice afternoon at home. My parents are in town visiting from the East Coast, which was a very good thing, because I seem to have caught the cold we've been passing around so I was able to nap all afternoon while my parents watched him. Anyway, all in all, this was a pretty easy hospitalization.

An abundance of caution

The bad news is we're back in the hospital. The good news is that it's not serious, and if all goes according to plan we'll be home tomorrow.

On Friday, we had noticed that the top of Magnus's incision from his last surgery was somewhat redder than it had been. By Saturday morning, it was redder, raised, and seemed to have some pus in it. I e-mailed a photo of it to his cardiologist, who forwarded it to the surgeon who said that it looked like breakdown of the suture (normal) that was causing a bit of inflammation. They prescribed oral antibiotics and told us to clean the wound out with betadine, bandage it, and keep an eye on it.

On Sunday it was looking a little better, but then by yesterday afternoon, it had started oozing a little bit, and on top of that, he was showing symptoms of a mild cold. Iggy had been sick since Friday, so we weren't surprised, but we were a little nervous, so this morning, I e-mailed his cardiologist again and said that we wanted to bring him in. She squeezed him in at the clinic this morning, and she said she thought he looked better, but also wanted him to be looked at by one of the nurse practitioners who works with the surgeon. Our regular N.P. was busy with an emergency case, so we saw a different N.P. whom we'd met before but didn't know well. She also said she thought it looked better, but the surgeon, Dr. Azakie, was in a cautious mood and wanted him to be admitted to get IV antibiotics.

So here we are. He's had a dose of IV antibiotics and they cleaned his wound out and dressed it. In the course of cleaning it out, they opened it up a little bit so they want to make sure the wound looks "dry" tomorrow before they send us home. They also took some blood to do a white blood cell count (to check for inflammation) and it came back normal, which is great.

While we're not happy to be back at the hospital, it is kind of nice to have the monitors tell us how well he's doing! His oxygen sats are in the low to mid-80s, much higher than when he left the hospital. I had been a little worried about his sats since they lowered his diuretic dose a couple of weeks ago, but they're perfectly fine! And everyone has been impressed with how much weight he's gained. So hopefully, this is just a little blip and we go home tomorrow.