SamBeller.org

Thursday, April 13, 2000

Sam's Transition Home

Dearest Sam’s Fan Club,

It’s been a sweet transition to home. It just goes to show you what healing of the spirit does for healing of the body. Sam’s progressively used less and less Oxygen every day he’s been home. He’s so happy and so much better rested.

He still gets stressed from the pain at times and we’ll give him a little supplemental Oxygen. We’re still using Tylenol with Codeine to help manage the pain. And when he sits up, he’s still draining fluid from part of the incision near his lower back. We go to see Dr. Bobechko on Friday to let him evaluate how it is all healing. We hope no addition sutures are needed to help keep this area closing up - but we are ready for that part of the incision to be closed as it is hard to keep it clean and not infected since Sam use diapers.

We’ve had a nurse from 8AM-8PM every day and another one from 11PM-7AM through the night. We may get more hours approved later in the week. We’ll see. We are so thankful to have this help. We pray that Sam can be well soon so that we can start weaning down from these nursing hours and go back to being our own family at home. But, for now, the help is wonderful and lightens our load so we can focus more on the fun stuff with Sam and the other kids. And we definitely now have more control over Sam’s care since we are in the home environment. However, if we didn’t need sleep, we’d just like to care for all Sam’s needs ourselves since we know him better than any of the nurses do (so we do it the best ).

Today, Kelly’s sister, Saphire arrives (more troops) with daughter, Melynda (7). We are thrilled to have more family coming to help with the transition home (so we can catch up on rest and perhaps even have a date).

Sam’s time at home has been such a blessing and we are still so very thankful that he’s home already!

We’ll keep you posted on our appointment with Dr. Bobechko on Friday.

Much love,
David & Kelly