Recovery II (Hey Jude)

While Megan slurs out unintelligible questions from her afternoon nap (I think she just said "body-cast's the worst"), 2000 miles away our family and friends are moving us into our first house. And I am pondering the significance of a passing comment that Dr. DeLia made yesterday.

This is a Catholic hospital. Something I would have never given a second thought except that it might explain why our Dr. felt comfortable showing us the pictures of the two Patron Saints that he always carries with him into the operating room. The first is St Gerard the Patron Saint of pregnant women. The second is St. Jude the Patron Saint of lost causes. The very thought of which puts a lump in my throat. Not because it makes me feel our boys are a lost cause. But because the foremost authority on the syndrome recognizes these cases as a lost cause, and has great hope for them any way. I am reminded that without the treatment that he pioneered they are, in the eyes of medical statistics, a lost cause. A battle that has already fallen to one side and offers nothing to gain by fighting.

As we lay here resting, the eight inch question mark shaped scar around Megan's belly button is healing. And we are asking: Is this a lost cause? Will our boys be on the right side of the statistics? Answers are still far away. But we do know that the battle is still on. Perhaps by the time the scar is healed the question will be answered.

We viewed the video of our surgery this morning. Not the gory parts, just the fetoscopic lasering part. We also got a nice picture of the big boy's face in full color. Dr. DeLia seriously said he looked like me. Of course I thought he did for what little that is worth. The video shows the outside of the placenta and all of the blood vessels which feed the babies. The idea is to occlude all of the vessels which run between the two, and leave all the vessels which are their individual food supplies. What he found though was that there were only very small vessels that appeared to cross-feed. He occluded all of them, but had expected to see larger more obvious cross feeding going on. He is confident from his experience that they are disconnected. So we wait to see results that are probably still weeks away.

Thank you so much to all who are moving our stuff, and washing the dishes that we left in the sink. We wish we were there.

P.S. I am glad that I am not praying to saints. They are really hard to keep track of. Did you know that there is a patron saint for pigs, pow's, peasant girls, pilots, pin-makers, prostitutes(reformed), pork processors and potholers? Just to name a very few! I didn't. Perhaps I need to understand the system a little better. Are the candles scented accordingly? If so don't send us one for the patron saint of pork processors...
No disrespect intended.