We've been a little busy, though, hence the lack of updates. Nate came home last Sunday and has steadily improved since. The healing is going well and both incisions are looking good (no thanks to his lifting Bryn when I'm not looking.) His pain is staying under control and he's slowly decreasing the pill-popping. He'll get the rest of the staples out on Tuesday - they removed the first half the day he left. He had no appetite for several days and lost about 10 lbs, but it's steadily increased and last we checked he's gained 5 back. So all's well.

You may or may not recall that last time Nate had surgery (January '09)he came home, got violently and painfully ill, and had to go back to the hospital and have another surgery to get his ileostomy put in. The doctor couldn't close up the incision because there was infection like crazy (think intestines coming apart and all that food going wherever it could find a place), so Nate was still wide open to the tune of lots of nurses coming to watch every time they changed his dressing because it was pretty uncommon (and pretty horrifying). Then for at least a month after coming home (details are fuzzy here) Nate had a woundvac, which was basically a sponge hooked to a vacuum that slurped the wound closed so it could heal. He had it with him 24/7 and we had homecare nurses coming several times a week to change it. It finally closed up (after shingles and several fights with staph infection) and he had an ileostomy (aka: saved his life, but also a major pain in the bum) until last W...

Tomorrow (August 3) Nate will be having an ileostomy takedown. aka: surgery. But it's happy surgery. You may or may not remember all the health issues he had last January , but this will mark the close of that whole mess. So we are, of course, nervous, considering what happened the last time he got opened up, but mainly we're really really really excited! We'll let you know how it goes!

Well, the surgery is off until the 27th. Nice. Nate is sick as a dog with what appears to be a flare-up of his Crohn's disease - the first, I might add, since January. Seriously, what are the chances? So although I do want to be done being pregnant asap, we are now willing the baby not to come very early, since the surgery will be less than a month before the due date.

This Wednesday Nate goes back in for another surgery. It's called an ileostomy takedown - look it up if you care to know the details. We are very hopeful that this time around things will go much more smoothly than back in January - we're not in the middle of any flare-ups with Crohn's, different medication that seems to be mostly doing the trick, and we've been able to plan for this one. It will be SO NICE to have Nate's Mom and sister up here to lean on (probably quite heavily). Here's hoping for a complication-free operation and speedy recovery!

Apparently the destroying angel has taken up temporary residence at our house: Addison has croup, and the boy sounds awfully pitiful with his cough. Besides being a little extra whiney and clingy, he’s taking it like a champ, and still sleeps through the night. Michelle is kind of coming down with it too, but we’re hoping it won’t take. She's 2 weeks into the second trimester, and does well healthwise. Nate is a mess, period. His incision is healing quite well, thank you, but the rest of him is falling apart. He had a sore develop on his abdomen which of course he scratched and irritated until it grew to the size of an RV, and when his doctor saw it, she panicked about infection and gave him not one but two shots in the bottom end. Shoulda listened to Michelle one of the 40,000 times she said, “Leave it alone!” Nate also developed what he thought was just an embarrassingly severe case of acne on the right side of his face. Then his nurse told him it wasn’t acne. See, Nate takes an ...

First, the most recent update - My recovery has been swift. I ate grilled cheese sandwiches, mashed potatoes, apple sauce, and chocolate pie for dinner (ok, about two bites of each). And they say I'm outta here tomorrow! Best of all, barring any disasters, we'll be flying to St. George Friday night to be at my sister Lindsey's wedding on Saturday. Thought I'd just hit some random highs and lows. Thumbs down NG tube. This is just a synonym for "torture." Because they wanted my intestines to have lots of time to heal, they shoved a hose down my nose into my stomach and pumped out anything that showed up there. I couldn't move my head, felt like I was choking, couldn't swallow, couldn't get up without calling somebody in to unhook me. It would get jammed down there on the stomach wall and choke me, and whenever somebody came to visit, here I was with a tube sticking out my nose, green slime coming out. Sometimes the green slime coming out flowed back ...

Well, Nate came home from the hospital last Sunday. And today I'm writing this from his new hospital room, across the hall from the old one. On the 14th he had surgery to fix the crazy little end-of-small-intestine-to-end-of-colon connection. While they were at it, they found that where the small intestine normally hooks to the colon, it was so inflamed that it was basically blocked off. So they took out about 4 inches of small intestine and 4 of colon and connected the healthy stuff together. And as a bonus, the part of the intestine that they removed included his appendix. So that's a possible crisis averted. He ended up with an impressive scar (I'd guess about 5 inches) and a jp drain to show for it. We came home the following Monday (the 19th) and sweated/cried/rejoiced our way through a tough week of progress. About Tuesday or Wednesday the drainage started looking weird (think mud), so we called the doc who asked us several questions and determined it was fine. Then t...

For the first time in 190 hours, I just slept hard enough that I woke up not knowing where I was, not expecting and not feeling any pain in my abdomen, and not feeling my IV either. Such a good feeling--going back to sleep now. Hopefully more later.

Something really really good must be coming our way, because once again, we're having a bit of a tough time. Nate spent Saturday throwing his guts up and hurting a lot. We called our doctor in the evening and they told us to head to the ER to get some fluids back in him so he could kick whatever was bugging him. One of my visiting teachers came over after we put Addison down and we headed up to McKay-Dee in Ogden. We only had to wait about an hour and a half to be seen, and they were quick about giving Nate a fabulous hospital gown, morphine, anti-nausea stuff, an iv full of saline, and a barf bag. We talked to a doctor shortly thereafter and explained about Nate's Crohn's Disease and they decided to do a CT scan of his intestines. There was a 2 hour prep where he had to drink two giant cups of disgustingness and the x-ray was scheduled for 1:30 a.m. We sat around, read, chatted, and tried to ignore the noise coming through our shower curtain that served as a door. Then at...