Football is coming...

Just a quick update to let people know that my Dad is back at the medical rehabilitation center as of Friday, and things are going very well. He is on blood thinners to dissolve the clots in his body, and that seems to have helped with the confusion and speech. He is getting a little stronger and every day brings him one step closer to going home. So far so good.

On another note, we are gearing up for school to start for both Matthew (Kindergarten) and Andrew (teaching and coaching). I must say that I am really excited for Matthew to start at our local school because I am looking forward to meeting more people in the neighborhood. Matthew is a little anxious about meeting new people and what to expect of Kindergarten in general.

Football is about to start and is heading at us like a freight train. This begins the most hectic and stressful time of year for the Welsh family, as Andrew takes on a 70 hour work week, and my life resembles that of a single mom. I am not looking forward to it, but I know that we will get through it as we always do.

Matthew has started a fall soccer league and is so excited about it. Unfortunately, the coach thinks that kids under 6 need two practices a week, so that just adds more stuff to our already busy lives.

I have given up my beloved dance lessons for the fall, as it doesn't work with our new schedule, but I've picked up another hobby -- adult gymnastics class. I know, crazy, huh? But, I'm totally excited about doing some gymnastics again.

That's all for now!

A major setback...

My Dad was transferred last week to a medical rehabilitation center for physical and occupational therapy. We were so excited that he was moving on and were sure that with the aggressive therapy there he would be back on his feet in no time. He has continued to have some slurring of speech and confusion, which we all figured was likely still due to the drugs that he had been given for such a lengthy period of time during his ICU stay. The new doctors and nurses, however, wanted to run some tests to determine if anything else was going on.

They performed a CT scan, MRI, and Doppler of my Dad's head and neck this weekend and found some disturbing things. He has a clot in his lung, and I think 3 clots in his brain that have formed recently (within the last 3-4 days or so). So, he was taken back to the ER yesterday afternoon, and was placed back into ICU last night. They have started him on blood thinning medication to dissolve the clots, but this carries with it significant risk for internal bleeding (following his recent surgery). We will be walking a fine line for a while. It is risky to do nothing, but also risky to give the blood thinner, as well.

The good news is that they may have found an issue that could have reared its ugly head in a fatal way in a matter of days. The bad news is that we have taken a major step backward and are back in the ICU for an undetermined number of days. These setbacks really take their toll on the whole family. The range of emotions we've experienced over the last month have been just exhausting.

Dad is Out of ICU

It's true...after 24 days he was moved out of the ICU today and into another room in the hospital!

He has been making tremendous progress this week. All of the "tubes" are out of his body (catheter and chest tube were the last to go yesterday and today). He is eating food, talking, and working hard with physical therapy. His mental state is very clear now, and he certainly hasn't lost his sense of humor.

The challenge now is to get him physically stronger. He can't quite feed himself yet, stand, or sit in a chair on his own. So, he needs a great deal of rehabilitation to be physically independent. The doctors would like to see him transferred soon to an inpatient medical rehabilitation center near the hospital where he would work aggressively with physical therapy 3-5 hours per day.

Needless to say, we are thrilled with the progress and we hope it keeps going in this positive direction.

Update on My Dad

Well I am happy to report that my Dad is doing much better this week.

He was finally (FINALLY) extubated on Tuesday morning after 17 days on the ventilator. He can talk, and they have evaluated his swallowing and OK'd him today to start eating hospital food. Not sure if that is a blessing or not :-)

He is no longer sedated and no longer on any pain meds, but we are starting to see the effects that prolonged use of these drugs has taken. It appears that Dad is suffering from something called ICU Psychosis or ICU Syndrome. Basically, he is unable to separate fantasy from reality (delusional), and is hallucinating. He says that he has some "very strange"memories of the time he has spent in ICU, and many of them may not be real. This is apparently fairly common in people that have been sedated for long periods of time in the ICU, and it should go away completely when he leaves ICU.

Yesterday he was agitated, and was talking about not living much longer. That made for a tough and sad day for all of us. Today he was, well...amusing. I will protect him from any embarrassment, but, for example, he seems to have an intense craving for fruit (mangoes and grapes especially), and says that his water is not water, but it tastes delicious. It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the next several days to weeks.

The physical therapy team also started working on the goal of getting him to stand up and get out of bed. You can imagine that we are so excited to see such major steps taken this week (no pun intended).

Laundry Countertop

This weekend we finally completed a project I've been wanting to do for a long time - putting a countertop over our front-loading washer and dryer in the laundry room. The project took a little thought because we didn't want a permanent countertop due to the fact that the shut-off valves would be underneath it. Our washer/dryer are also super deep, and it was going to be tough to find something that would cover them. But, in the end we installed a preformed laminate countertop that rests on 2x4's, and we're happy with the result. No more missing socks behind the dryer - hooray! The before and after pics are below.

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Worst Date Night Ever

Andrew and I had tickets last night to go see Blues Traveler and Big Head Todd at the Paul Mason winery up in the mountains nearby. Great music that was sure to bring back college memories, good wine, and a beautiful warm evening in the mountains - what could be better? We had been waiting for this night for months!! My niece Hilary was coming over to babysit and the kids were super excited.

But alas, 5 minutes before Hilary arrived Matthew dives for a ball in the family room and hits his head (hard) on the coffee table. I saw it happen and thought, "ouch, that one is going to hurt!" Matthew immediately started crying and held his head, and I rushed over to comfort him. He moved his hand and there was blood all over his hand, and streaming down his face. Well, there goes date night...

Andrew and I drove Matthew off to the emergency room. We headed to the same hospital that my dad is at, thinking maybe we could squeeze in a visit while we were there. The waiting room at the ER was packed, of course. We waited for an hour to see the triage nurse. She showed Matthew a chart that had pictures ranging from a very happy face to a crying face, and asked him to point to the one that showed how he was feeling. He chose the happiest face on the chart (the kid was excited to be out of the waiting room!), which bought us another hour in the waiting room. Note to self: teach Matthew the finer points of triage.

We finally get back to an ER room two hours after arriving, and they put numbing gel on the gash in his head. It had finally stopped bleeding, and was just oozing a bit at this point. We wait for another 45 minutes for the doctor to be available to put four stitches in his head. We finally got home at 10:30 at night, without having eaten any dinner. Needless to say, we were all tired and a wee bit cranky.

I'm starting to feel like fate is just not smiling down on me these days. Do I dare ask "what's next?" But, our little Frankenstein is doing just fine. We're watching him for signs of concussion and we've been teasing him about having a scar to match Harry Potter. Poor kid, and poor us for having the worst date night ever.

Update on My Dad

My Dad is still in Intensive Care. He is doing remarkably well, all things considered, and he continues to improve a little bit each day. The recovery is just going to be very long (months), but at least he is heading in the right direction.

We are 11 days post-op, and they still have him on a ventilator. They wanted to take the tubes out days ago, but he developed pneumonia in both lungs, and they had to wait for that to clear up. They are again weaning him off the vent today in the hopes of extubating this afternoon or tomorrow morning. This will be a big step with his condition, and we are all a bit scared and anxious for it.

Dan has been awake and, while not able to talk with the tubes in, he is asking questions and understands everything. It takes about 30 minutes to figure out what he is asking for with pictures, and pointing to letters on paper, and only about 5 seconds to answer him. Needless to say, we are all eager for the tubes to be out. He remembers everything up to the aneurysm, but the post-surgery time frame is a little fuzzy for him (due to heavy sedatives and painkillers). They are no longer concerned about any neurological changes that could have occurred during the surgery, which is another miracle in itself.

So, things are going well, and we are so thankful to all of you for your thoughts and prayers. What a tremendous blessing it is to have such wonderful friends and family!

A very rough weekend

Fourth of July weekend was going to be very busy for our family. We had Kayla's birthday to celebrate, and barbecues to attend, and my brother was going to start the TransPac race (a sailboat race from LA to Hawaii) down in San Diego.

But life threw us a curve ball...

Friday night my dad was rushed to the hospital with an aortic aneurysm. Before rupturing, it dissected the arteries in his body from his neck down to his legs. This is a catastrophic event that results in death more than 90% of the time. He had emergency surgery that night, and sometime early Saturday morning we were told there was nothing more that could be done. They would transfer him to ICU and we would probably have an hour or two to say our goodbyes.

But somehow, we have been blessed with a miracle, and he is still with us. He is improving a little bit every day, and while the long term prognosis is still very uncertain, we now have hope where we had none before.

Please pray for our family and for my Dad. We have already seen a few miracles already, but I'm hoping that we will be granted a couple more to get through the next few critical milestones of recovery. Thanks for all of your love and support. It means the world to us.

Bears

Kayla named her two stuffed bears this week. One is called "Mia", and the other is "Freckaleckamunomuno." Huh? The funny thing is she has actually remembered Freckaleckamunomuno's name for four days now.

We're Back from Our Cruise

I'm back! Where does the time go? Can't believe it's been a month since my last post. What on Earth have we been doing all this time? Well, work has been really busy for Melissa (a couple of 50-60 hour weeks). Andrew just finished up the school year and is now off for the summer. And we all just got back from a great vacation to the Caribbean.

We went on a 7-day Royal Caribbean cruise aboard the Freedom of the Seas (picture below). We left out of Port Canaveral, FL and stopped at a private island owned by the cruise line called CocoCay, and then at St. Thomas, and St. Maarten.

The ship is enormous and beautiful and has an ice skating rink and even a miniature golf course on board. The food was fantastic, and they have an amazing kids program. We were not sure if they would let Kayla participate because she isn't 3 yet, but they did, and it was so great to have several hours a day of adult-only time for Mommy and Daddy. Here are some pics of Matthew, and Kayla with my mom and Grandma at a talent show that the kids did with the kids program.

They also have this cool thing called a FlowRider. It's a surfing simulator, and is very fun to watch. I didn't get a chance to try it this time, but here is a video of Uncle Steve trying it out - very amusing.

Andrew and I went on a snorkeling trip at St. Thomas (without the kids) to a place called Turtle Cove. There were tons of sea turtles to look at and the water is so clear and warm. It was a nice little excursion.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that before we embarked on the ship we took a trip to Kennedy Space Center, which was very fun for Melissa. Here is a pic of Matthew standing under a Saturn V - the rocket that sent the Apollo missions to the moon. It's HUGE (the picture only shows a small part of it)! We also saw the Space Shuttle on the launch pad from a distance, which was also very cool.

It was such a great trip and I can't wait to do it again sometime! Here is a pic of the family on the last night of the cruise. The seas were so calm, it was almost eerie. We had a great time, and it was the perfect way to spend our last vacation of the year.