# Chateau de la Tobler

## Thursday, December 21, 2006

### Gideon our "strong fighter"

I will never allow anything negative to be said of Primary Children's Hospital. Not only are their nurses, doctors, and staff AMAZING, but they have free wireless internet. Now that is hospitality.
This first picture is of me just before Gideon's birth. Lovely, I know. It wasn't so easy of a birth--the pushing was extremely hard, and his elbow got stuck. Ow. Anyway, we made it through, and they whisked him through the window into the NICU. As they were finishing me up, the NICU nurse stuck her head through the window and told us Gideon's apgars were good (means his breathing, color, etc were good), and that he was breathing on his own. Brad went over to check on him and got to touch him for a second.
Before they took him over to the Infant Unit at Primary Children's, the Life Flight transport team brought him by my room. He was in this amazing bionic contraption--a full Life Flight stretcher with an incubator on one end and all the electronic equipment on the other end. Very intimidating-looking, and sort of funny when you consider they were transporting him all of five minutes away through heated hallways. But they just treat all transfers the same, I guess. But they opened the side of the incubator and let me stroke him and touch his little head and feet and all. I was super-glad they let us do that, because it was after ten pm before they let me go from my hospital room over to Gideon's.
His little feet are definitely deformed, his little back had the mylomengiocel (don't quote me on that spelling), but he is a beautiful little boy. His hands are precious and perfect, his little face bruised but beautiful (he got pretty battered during the birth).
Gideon's surgery was yesterday morning, and it went very very well indeed. Couldn't have gone better, in fact. The doctors basically took the "bubble" and pushed it into his back and sewed it back up. The scar on his back is certainly not cosmetic in any way--it's big and ugly--but really, who cares? Not me.
Now for the news on the movement front: he has movement in his hips, his knees, his thighs, and his calves. We don't yet know how much in terms of percentages, but he is constantly moving moving moving those legs, so we know it's there. (In fact, at some point in time during this pregnancy, he did a complete flip though the umbilical cord, which had a perfect knot in it. The head doctor was showing it off to all his residents, so Bradley took a picture.) The physical therapist couldn't detect any movement in his ankles or feet. This is all very excellent news. As far as bowels and bladder--they work, but he'll be having tests (likely tomorrow) to see what extent his control and abilities are. All of this is preliminary and subject to change, but on every single front the prognosis is as good or better than we hoped. It's been a MARVELOUS couple of days.

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