Brody is Home

We are happy to be home....

We came home on Thursday. The Discharge planner at Nationwide Children's was able to arrange with the help of the team at Toledo Children's hospital everything we needed to come home. Including Brody's pain medicine (has to be administered by IV)-- we have a hospital bed, infusion pumps for IV's and NJ feeding-- and lots and lots of supplies for doing port flushes, dressing changes, etc...

Our friends Carolyn and Tom hung out at our house on Thursday when everything was being delivered-- giant thanks.

Brody ended up coming home in our car vs ambulance-- There apparently was not a protocol for administering Brody's pain med in an ambulance and we did NOT want to give him morphine (and slow down his gut any)-- so Brody chose to ride home in the van. I couldn't get him to look up long enough for a pic (he was playing on his tablet) but did good on the way home but started having some pain when were were about 20 minutes out. He persevered and we were able to give him some pain medicine as soon as he got home (was waiting for us)-- as well as a nurse to show us how to operate everything-- fortunately the infusion pumps are pre-programmed and very user friendly.

We went in to Toledo hospital for an exam, labs, and to get a few odds and ends supplies we were missing and needed on Friday but mainly we have been trying to get used to his care routine.... we have a very strict schedule we have to maintain. For both of us nothing we have to do isn't anything we haven't seen done hundreds of times--sterilizing & flushing his IV (Port) access points but it is very different doing than watching. So far so good.

Trish has done an excellent job of organizing all or our supplies and we worked out a med schedule that so far has worked for us but that we may have to tweak a little bit.

I would love to write more but I am letting Trish catch up on some sleep and it is getting close to the time we have to switch from Brody's TPN to his IV fluids (we were told that for his next batch of TPN they will just combine the fluids with the TPN so they run together and for a longer period of time so we won't have to switch them)

More later