Have Yourselves a Merry Little Christmas

Santa came! Santa came! Stockings, presents, ornaments everywhere.

Sarah graciously offered to help Jane out with the unwrapping.

Jane, as always, remained skeptical of the proceedings.

After the presents had been oohed and aahed over, we took our Christmas dinner trays to the family room.

It tasted about exactly as good as it looked.

Jane got in some snuggles with Awesome Nurse Angela (whose awesome family surprised her at the hospital by bringing in Christmas dinner -- isn't that lovely?), and we headed back north.

I could leave it at that, but we are ALL about the honesty here. It... wasn't a great day. I went to the hospital while Tom and Sarah went swimming, and when I arrived Jane was not acting herself, and Angela was concerned. Okay, freaking out. Our girl was clammy and her temperature was a little low, and she was pretty out of it. She wasn't attentive or active. It was not cool. So Lon, the awesome respiratory therapist, came over and tried a couple things and decided to administer her Duoneb (a bronchodilator) treatment a little early. He discovered she hadn't received her six o'clock treatment -- it was in the machine, but it hadn't gone through. She'd been exhausting herself trying to breathe. So Lon gave her her treatment and almost immediately she started acting like herself again.

Rounds came shortly after and the team wanted to order a CBC and full septic workup and even a lumbar puncture (!), but Angela and I got them to stand down and wait a couple of hours to see if she had really gotten her feet back under her. For the most part, she had. She wasn't able to deal with being off the ventilator rate, so the trial was stopped after thirty minutes instead of three hours, but otherwise she was doing better.

But the whole day was colored by the mood of the morning. Poor Jane never had a moment to herself. ENT came up to check on her trach site just after she had fallen asleep. There was some concern about the wound and the skin on her neck, but the ENT resident thought it all looked fine. Jane had just dropped off again when the team stopped by to see how she was doing, and of course she woke.

Finally, she gave up and threw a nutty. Can you blame her? Poor kid spent the morning trying to breathe, and then never got a chance to get comfortable the rest of the day. I'd have thrown a tantrum myself. The team's still not convinced that it was just the Duoneb treatment, but at this point there's no evidence that it was anything else.

Happily, we made arrangements with Santa to come to our house tonight, so we get a do-over. Damn, do we need one.