Checked In

So we are all settled into our room and getting ready for surgery tomorrow. They just drew some of Stephen's labs and did his IV, but he'll have some more labs later today. We lucked out and got the best room in the IMC (the intermediate unit that's between the PICU and the regular pediatric unit)! It's the biggest room with two sleep chairs. That means neither Bill or I have to sleep on the dreaded bench. It's pretty sad when you get excited over something like that. But the big bummer is that we have to move to the PICU (the pediatric ICU) tomorrow. Stephen will need to go to the PICU after surgery so they can properly manage his pain and manually do his dialysis. He'll be on very low fill volumes in order to let the stitches heal and doing it manually let's the doctors make changes at any point. But to put it bluntly, the PICU sucks. It's depressing, the rooms stink (some don't even have a bathroom at all and none of the rooms have showers), only one of us is allowed to stay overnight and there are no sleep chairs, just a bench, and we don't know any of the doctors or nurses. We've been in the IMC enough that we pretty much know all of the nurses, and they know Stephen. But hopefully we will only need to be there one night and then we can come back to our sweet room. Haha.

But really the most depressing thing of all is that we are back in the hospital period. We were packing up the car this morning and our neighbors assumed we were taking off for the beach. Nope. We should be heading to the beach, but instead we are stuck inside the confines of a hospital.

Stephen took a little nap this afternoon and Bill and I headed to our favorite snack place in the heart center for a cup of coffee, browse through the gift shop (someone loves candy), and to grab a few minutes of peace and sun in the healing garden; our favorite spot in the whole hospital. It's sad that I just wrote those words. That we have our "favorite places" to go to in a hospital. No one should know a hospital like the back of their hand unless they work in a hospital everyday. It just plain sucks and I would rather be anywhere but here right now. The only upside is that Stephen will hopefully never remember any of this or the pain he will be in following his surgery tomorrow.