Coming home tomorrow (hopefully)

The hospital continues to be rather vague about things, but we think Tom will be coming home tomorrow.

He has a severely herniated disk and they have given him the option to either take oral meds and do PT, have steroid injections in his spine and do PT and then as a last resort (if the first two do not work) surgery AND more PT.

He's thinking he'll go w/ the oral meds and some PT (I'm hoping HOPING HOPING he will do some chiropractic work in conjunction w/ his PT) and see how that goes before having a needle inserted in his spine... I assure you this is no fun. I don't know if that is a one time deal and then see what happens or if it's a series of shots... ??? He's also experiencing some numbness in his foot now... doc says that may never go away. GREAT!

We are undecided about our trip out to Seattle.. which is supposed to take place in about three weeks. It will depend largely on how Tom is feeling and the PT schedule he is given. The Orthopedist apparently couldn't give him any information as to how long or how intense the PT would be. Considering that his herniation is pretty severe I would imagine that he's in for some pretty intense PT. I can't imagine traveling w/ two 25 lb kids and all the crap that goes along w/ that in his condition, but like I said we'll see.

Yesterday I was feeling pretty good, like this wasn't too hard to handle or anything. I was running back and forth between home, dental appts, the hospital and thankfully Mom was able to sit w/ the kids while I did this running around. Today... it hit.. hard. For some reason I started to feel overwhelmed and stressed over the whole thing. :( I didn't even make it over to the hospital to see Tom b/c when I was going to go a severe thunderstorm started and there were tornado warnings and Tom rathered I stay home than go out in that weather. :( I feel for Tom and the pain he's in, I'm stressed that the docs can't give us very much information (and certainly aren't doing it in a timely fashion!) and I just don't like having things in limbo. I want to know what we should expect from the next 6 months of PT. The doc couldn't have said, "Well, your herniation is pretty severe and in the past I've seen people do PT for X amount of months"? Like are we talking a month of INTENSE PT, 3 months? 6 months? A year? I mean come on! You got nothing to say to us about this! I'm sure he sees a lot of back injuries.

Anyway... after hitting the wall today the kids spent a fair amount of time first watching Shrek then The Incredibles. They probably only watched about 20 minutes total b/c they can't sit still to save their lives, but when I first turned it on it was like baby crack! I've never ever seen them this still before... for that long.


They chose to sit next to one another all by themselves.. this is not staged. How cute!

And here is Lily talking to Daddy on the phone. She insisted on holding the phone herself and even held it properly! (a first)

My beautiful little girl. Look at that sweet little mouth! Doesn't she look so peaceful talking to her daddy... she was not anywhere close to that peaceful when she was insisting on holding the phone herself!