In My Copious Free Time

the cutest dilemma

I can't decide what is more startling...that my nephew Grady is 7 months old already or that he just gets cuter every day. Just when I think he can't get any cuter, boom.

He's here!

Grady Luke Borden arrived at 2:55 pm CDT today! He weighed 7 pounds, 12 ounces and was 20.75 inches long and in perfect health. Jillian is doing well, which isn't surprising since from the start of the pitocin to being ready to push was only 8 hours (5 with the epidural), and she probably didn't push 10 times total and he was here. She did a great job and made it all look easy. He's even been nursing away like a pro, much to her surprise and amazement. She and Gary are so happy and relieved that he's here and everything went so well.

I'm so proud of her. :)

Today is the day!

We're all up and getting ready to head to Helen Keller Hospital for my sister Jillian to have her baby. It's still hard for me to believe that my baby sister is about to become a mother. I'm so thankful that I can be here for her, so excited for her and her husband Gary, and so happy and eager to see her little boy come into the world. Jillian has been so brave and really kept her sense of humor and practicality through all of this, and I'm so proud of her. It's been a bittersweet journey, I know -- we're all missing Mother so much through this.

When Alex was born, my mother knit him a blanket. Knowing she was sick and that she likely would not live to see my eight-years-younger sister have a child, she began knitting another blanket to put aside for her. I'm not quite sure when she started it, but she eventually became too sick to finish it. I took it home this summer, determined to finish it myself. Unfortunately, I couldn't figure out the pattern, but the mother of a co-worker helped me out by reading the pattern, figuring out where Mother had stopped, and did the last few rows of the design repeat that I couldn't figure out. I was so happy to be able to finish the blanket, but it was a difficult experience, holding the needles she held, finishing the work that cancer made her unable to finish, doing the job she wanted so badly to do. She might not be physically here to hold her newest grandson, but he will surely be wrapped in her love by all of us in many ways.

Errata

So, it seems that I was laboring under some faulty assumptions. I didn't realize that the surgery which had originally been discussed was not the surgery my brother was having. Yesterday's procedure was minimally invasive - they went in via a small incision in front of his ear and went in through a small, natural opening of the skull. Details are sketchy, but about 75cc of spinal fluid spontaneously ejected from the cyst just from having some pressure relieved. I don't know what the source of the pressure relief was or if this is even an accurate description. But apparently the surgeon said that after measuring the fluid, they were happy with that reduction and didn't do anything to further drain or disturb it. So that's why the procedure was so short. A CT scan later in the day showed a sizable void in the area that was previously all fluid. All reports are good.

The downside is that even on morphine and Dilaudid, he now has the mother of all headaches, and this will probably continue for the next week or two. I can only imagine that as the brain tissue decompresses after being deformed by such a large mass, there would be a lot of pain. I guess this is a classic case of "you have to get worse to get better."