T-minus three days

The night before Blaise was born, while Ben tried to sleep on the fold-out chair in our room at the Brigham, I watched the DePaul men's basketball team lose to Notre Dame. I was trying to not think about what the perinatologist had said to us a few hours earlier: "I've been doing maternal-fetal medicine for 25 years and I don't know what this is." File that under Things You Never Want to Hear a Doctor Say. Watching sports is good for not thinking about big stuff. You just turn off your brain and watch the ball. Fitting, then, that Blaise's surgery is on Opening Day and the day of the NCAA men's basketball championship game.

We're both nervous and excited for Monday. Hopefully, the surgery will mean no more ostomy, which would be nice because her stoma is in a funny spot and the bag for catching stool falls off at least once a day. We've done as many as 5 bag replacements in a single 12-hour shift. Not fun for anyone, especially Blaise. But, of course, surgery brings with it a lot of risks and we can't help but be nervous about them. There is also the possibility that Blaise will come out of surgery with another ostomy, since they could find unattached small bowel and want to be darn sure it works before connecting it up. So this surgery should make things easier, but if her surgeon feels like it's necessary to get "creative" (his term, not mine), it might be a little more complicated for a while and we could be facing another surgery.

Blaise, of course, has no idea that any of this is going to happen, which makes life easy for her, but a little hard for us. I'd like to be able to explain this to her and warn her that she's going to feel pretty lousy next week, but that it will get better. At least she won't remember it.

She continues to charm everyone who meets her. More than one volunteer has commented on how fun she is to play with and she's becoming very interested in what's going on around her. That's a bit of a problem because she doesn't want to nap during the day: too much to see! She's also weighing in at a whopping 7 lbs, 4 oz and taking half an ounce of milk by mouth every 4 hours, in addition to 7 mL (about a quarter ounce) every hour by her g-tube. No problems tolerating that amount so far. She'll start back at baseline (1 mL/hour by g-tube; nothing by mouth) after the surgery, but she'll work back up. Gran and Aunt Mo are here until Wednesday, so lots of extra adoration coming her way.