Recovery

Esperanza's back at the home! Wow, open heart surgery Monday, back at the home Thursday- that's pretty quick! We have her pretty well separated from the other kids, because ideally she would have spent a few more days in the hospital, but for a number of reasons she's back at the home a little early. However, this does speak of how rapidly she is recovering!! She stayed in the ICU until she came back with us, but the fact that she's already healthy enough to come home is incredible to me! Until Monday we will keep her pretty isolated for her own sake. Her lungs have some slime in them at the moment, which is typical after this type of surgery, and already normal for her because of her cleft lip and cleft pallet, but we have a physical therapist coming in each day to do chest compressions to help loosen up the flem, and we have her on a special schedule of moving her around in her crib/just changing her position to try and keep the fluids loose inside in the hopes of getting them out. Also, she's on a pretty rigid medicine intake. However, it's exciting to have her back. She's not quite back to herself completely, but she smiles and kicks around some when she's feeling a little better, which is really encouraging. You can tell she's still in some pain, but she is doing really really good for how recent she had her surgery. Thanks for all who have been praying! Monday she will have an appointment to see how recovery is going and then after that life will be able to go a little bit "back to normal" for her, although I'm sure we'll be keeping an extra good eye on her for more than a few more weeks to make sure she's getting better as she should.