Family Time

We had such a great night tonight! For the first time in over six weeks, we all sat down and had dinner at the same time, ate the same thing, then had our game night that we often do at home. We've attempted this several other times, but schedules, sleep, diet, etc. didn't allow it to happen. It was so wonderful to hang out together all evening and watch the boys laugh so hard they almost couldn't breathe. With the 24 hour rotation Todd and I have been keeping, it's rare we spend more than an hour a day together during the week and that's usually a quick brain dump of what happened at the hospital/home while the other one wasn't there. Todd and Luke are staying at a sleep room here at the hospital so we'll have breakfast together, Luke will come to OT/PT and then we'll get back to our rotation. I really miss our family time, it was just what we all needed.

Todd and I were talking tonight about how much faster this past three weeks has gone vs. the three weeks he was in ICU. Being in the ICU we spent our time praying and hoping he wouldn't develop any complications, constantly watching the monitors, stressing anytime his brain pressure spiked and basically waiting for him to wake up and see if the Jake we knew was still with us. It was emotionally draining. While all of that was happening, we didn't allow ourselves to go to the place where the true reality was that we could have easily lost him when the aneurysm initially burst or during surgery, or that he could have suffered additional brain damage from any number of complications. We could be in a very different place today and feel very blessed and thankful to be where we are.

Being in rehab has had a different set of challenges, the biggest now being his awareness of what's going on and not being happy about it. During the past three weeks he's made tremendous progress...  he has been weened off all the sedation drugs, is no longer agitated, the fixations have past, he's eating and sleep is getting better. We still don't know how much of his left side he'll recover or if he'll have issues down the road, but he's working hard, improving every day and that's all we can ask for. Thank you for all your continued prayers for his recovery.