Home, at long last!!!!

Well, we are happy to say that we are finally home! God had one last (huge) lesson in patience for us before we were able to leave Miller Children's Hospital, but nevertheless, we slept in our own beds for the first time in weeks last night. :)

Caitlyn spent the last day at the hospital in isolation as they were waiting for a stain of the mucous sample to come back from the lab. They wanted to be certain that she did not have tuberculosis. She also had a chest x-ray to see how much the procedure improved the blockage to the lung. The chest x-ray showed a good enough amount of improvement for the okay to go home, although, the doctors had been optimistic that it would have opened up even more. There is still a good sized area that remains blocked, but her lung function is pretty much optimum, so there was no problem in letter her go home.

We will continue to have follow ups in the next months to be sure the lung continues to clear. The lab cultures take a while to grow, so we will hopefully find out in the next few weeks if there was another infection on top of the mycoplasma pneumonia that was making Caitlyn so sick. For now, she is considered not contagious and can return to school on Monday.

Caitlyn will be doing some respiratory therapy from home, but otherwise, it's back to the daily routine. She is still sleeping right now (8:00) but I'm sure she is very happy to be home.

So, about our adventure last night... The doctors came by around 2:00 in the afternoon yesterday and let us know that Caitlyn would need to get some prescription medications as well as a nebulizer (to administer them) and that then we could be discharged. I started to call around to different pharmacies, but could not get in touch with one that had the nebulizer. A "case manager" at the hospital came to our room and offered to set everything up for us so that a private company would bring the nebulizer and medications to our room and I wouldn't have to go through the trouble of locating them myself. I was happy to let her do that, of course, and we were told that they would probably arrive sometime in the late afternoon/early evening. Thus began the wait... At around 6:30 I started to wonder where the stuff was and asked the nurse. She phoned the vendor company, but they would not commit a time that the products would be delivered. She said that if they did not come by 8:30, she would call back and make sure it was on its way. The shift changed and we got a new nurse who called at 8:30 to find out what was taking so long, but she could not get in touch with an actual person and she had no information for us. We were very tired and frustrated at this point because David and driven with Kylie all the way down to Long Beach and Kylie was getting restless. By 9:45, we were finally put in touch with the on-call doctor who said she would try and figure out what was going on. She talked to a rep from the vendor who promised that the stuff would be delivered within the next hour. An hour and 15 minutes later, the nebulizer finally arrived... without the rest of the medications. We ended up having to go the pharmacy and waiting another half hour for our medications. At just about midnight, we finally left the hospital, frustrated and weary from the waiting. We don't know where the communication break down occurred, we didn't really have anyone to vent to. All the nightshift nurses really didn't know what was going on because they weren't around when the initial orders were placed. Anyway, it was not the happy "going-home-from-the-hospital" experience that we had anticipated, but the most important thing is that we did go home!

Thanks everyone, for your prayers. This is a time of our lives that we will never forget, because of all the love and support we have experienced.

With this chapter of our life coming to a close, it's time to move on to other things, like Kylie's fever and cold... It never ends. :P