I can’t thank you all enough for your prayers this weekend. At one point, I came home to shower and eat while My Marine and Little Man took a nap. I sat down for a moment and pulled up my friends page on LiveJournal and, with my regular friends’ entries and my blog feeds, saw three entries in a row asking for prayer for our baby boy. There were comments from people I don’t even know. I realize that this was not gravely life-threatening, but tears filled my eyes and I was so humbled to know that dear sisters and their families were lifting up our little family to our Heavenly Father, the Great Physician.

Little Man was released this morning from the hospital after his second set of blood results came through, showing that his potassium had reached a normal level and he was fully hydrated. They took him off the IV in the early morning, but wanted to watch him to see how he’d do. During the past two days, he has been sick every time he was off of it, and while they didn’t think it was much more than coincidence, they wanted to be sure. There are still some tests pending, and Troy still vomited seven times during the last twenty-four hours in the hospital, which is a bit concerning to the doctor. (Although to us, that is a HUGE improvement compared to the fifteen times per twenty-four hours that he had been getting sick!) We’ll be taking him to the doctor’s office at eight o’clock tomorrow morning to be checked, and until then he’s continuing to nurse and drink Pedialyte. He ate some banana tonight also (for potassium) and has nursed a few times, and he hasn’t been sick since we came home. (ETA: well, that didn’t last even till I finished typing this. Oh well…) The doctor told us it’s normal for him to have a little bit of spitting up after two weeks of intense vomiting, but he’s only done that once. He also gained back a pound of the two pounds he had lost (10% of his total body weight), although most of it is water and won’t be retained for long.

We’re very encouraged to see him playing and happy again… we missed our boy!! He started feeling better and wanting to play last night, which made keeping him still because of his IV pretty difficult. By the evening time, he was trying to bite his IV cord and we had to redo his splint because he kept pulling it off. :)

There were a couple incidents with one nurse in particular who wouldn’t allow us to stay with Troy when she was drawing blood, which we weren’t going to just let happen. First we were told it was “hospital policy,” then that it was just her preference, then that parents “freak out” and make it too hard for nurses to do their job, then she even said that the reason that the ER nurses have had a hard time finding a vein was because we were in the room (a very presumptuous statement!) . Sooo, we had to push the issue until they brought another nurse in who would do it with us there. We were impressed, though, later when the original head nurse came in and wasn’t irritated with us, thankfully. Overall, we had excellent care… good nurses and very attentive corpsman.

And, because we’re weird parents who like to take pictures of the “bad” times as well as the good ones… :)

A couple hospital pics

Feeling pretty sickie

Playing with his toy one-handed, with his trusty cup of Pedialyte beside him

Still not feeling so great, snuggling with Mommy

Starting to do a little better…. here’s the arm splint he had to wear for two and a half days to keep his arm from moving