Michigan Photos, Part 2

  Here is the second helping of favorite photos while we were living in Ann Arbor, Michigan for two and a half months while Emma prepared for and recovered from her 3D Splint surgery with Dr. Green. It is still considered to be an experimental procedure and she was the 16th patient to receive the splints.

 1/16/18: When you can't bring the baby to the snow, you bring the snow to the baby!! I loved that one of Emma's primary nurses, Bridget, let me fill up a bucket of snow to bring to Emma so she could feel it. I also loved that none of the desk staff questioned it.

 Emma always loves getting her hair shampooed with a head massage during bath time!

 1/18/18: Occupational Therapy with Alice to practice reaching for and grabbing objects.

 1/24/18: Around this time, although the rest of Emma's recovery from surgery was going well, because her trachea tissue is abnormally thin (less than 1mm thick) tearing occurred which created a couple small fistulas. One of the fistulas caused air to leak into her chest, and too much air caused a pneumothorax (collapsed lung). This happened on two different occasions, so twice she had to get a pericardial drain placed to suck out the air, and the chest tube to keep the lung open.

 1/27/18: Fresh air in the Law Quad, part of the University of Michigan.

 1/29/18: Snuggles with her new best friend. On this day Emma was having trouble maintaining a warm temperature and stable blood pressure. There were several reasons for this (blood needed for testing, but her body was not making enough new blood fast enough, and some of the meds she needed included a side effect of low blood pressure, etc) so they had to give her a blood transfusion on a few different days and put a thing that blew warm air on her under warm blankets. She was back on sedation and paralytics during this time so her ventilator pressures would stay low and keep the fistuals closed, in hopes that less air would leak into her chest. Poor baby.

 Sweet kisses from Daddy before one of her weekly bronchoscopies (2/5/18) and being read a Valentines book that was sent by Billie, one of Emma's primary nurses in Orlando (2/8/18)!

 2/8/18: Holding the baby's arm up while the nurse changed her chest tube dressing. She did very well and did not squirm or make any sad faces. She is such a brave little trooper!!

 2/10/18: I absolutely LOVED laying in the crib with Emma. I did this about six times? I liked it even more than holding her. I loved watching Fixer Upper or the Simone Biles biopic at night and talking to Emma during the commercials.

 2/12/18: Very excited to hold Emma after three weeks of not being able to because she had been on paralytics. Since I had my crib time with her, I definitely felt that it was fair to let Michael hold her first.

 2/14/18: After a meeting with Dr. Green, Michael and I decided that the best option was to vote against another surgery (a risky/ low survivable trachea replacement surgery which involved using her esophogas to cover up the fistulas)

 One big thing that Michael and I worked on with Emma while in Michigan was teaching her to hold the monkey pacifier herself. Every time we put it in her mouth to soothe and calm her, we also put her hands on the pacifier. Finally around her 7 month "birthday" she caught on and one day when I put the pacifier in, both hands reached up to hold the pacifier before I could reach for her hands myself. That was another proud parent day for sure!

2/20/18: Emma being her usual silly entertaining self and playing with her various tubes while sitting up in her fancy new Tumble Forms chair. 

We all flew back to Orlando on February 21st. :)