Wednesday, April 8

Believe it or not, the doctors finally got to us today at around 6:30 this evening. The plan is to let John leave from the hospital tomorrow, and we will go to Oxford since Monticello is a great place to raise kids and live, it's just not so great for his stage of heart failure. There are a lot of things to arrange, such as his at-home IV medications which are dispensed via a pump, how often the home health care nurse will have to come, all of the information that needs to be given to the transplant team about our living arrangements, etc., so I don't think we will get out of here too early. Besides, I'll need to make 14 trips to the car to get all of our stuff out of the room. It's a good thing I have the Excursion and not John's car. (The night they brought John here via the helicopter, I drove in the Excursion. Although it doesn't handle as well as his car, my thinking at the time was that if I hit a deer or something I would be able to keep going if I was in the Excursion. Guess it made sense at the time.)

Although we are very disappointed that things are delayed for getting a new heart, we are glad he is stable and able to go home. One of his cardiologists finally admitted that he never should have survived the amount of shocks he took, and the trauma to his system, so we are very thankful that we are at this point and he is able to go home. We are still taking it day to day, and will have to very closely monitor his electrolyte levels at home. It sure would be great to get that phone call at home that they have a heart, but we know that we are really blessed to be able to go home at all.

I will keep up the blog at home, probably not daily posts but I have a feeling we will still have updates if you are interested. I'll try not to bore you with the intricacies of his cardiovascular system. About all the excitement we would like is that phone call that tells us to hustle up to the hospital because a heart is waiting, but we'll keep you up to date. Thanks again for the kind thoughts, good wishes, posts, and cards that helped us get through the last 5 weeks with some semblance of sanity left.