The best part about being in the hospital

The cheesecake. Its not even that good, but its definitely the best part about being in there.

Drew's doctors consider the surgery a huge success!! They were able to lift the artery off of his trachea and allow it to open it a normal size. Its no longer compressed flat. While its still a little floppy from being compressed for so long, its definitely a big round opening now, like its supposed to be. We could instantly tell a difference in the way he sounded and hope that this solves many of his problems. He still has the CF, unfortunately theres no cure for that (yet), but hopefully with a normal sized and shaped trachea he will be able to clear his airways affectively and breathe a little easier.

While they were doing this procedure, they also did another bronchoscopy to look into his airways with a camera to see if the shape changed (it did, dramatically, for the better...incase you didn't understand the previous paragraph :) ). Unfortunately they also found a lot of mucus. A lot of thick, sticky, CF mucus that had been trapped down there. And there's bacteria in it. Its not terrible, none of the really bad CF infections were found, but there was some staph and they want to treat it. They want this to be a total cleansing and clearing new start for Drew, so they have decided to put him on a 2 week IV antibiotic treatment to try to eradicate all of the bacteria and mucus and give him a chance to start new. Tomorrow morning he will get a PICC line (Peripherally Inserted Central Catheter) and thats how they will administer the antibiotic (its basically a fancy IV). We will talk to the doctors in the morning about whether or not we can take him home and have Home Care nurses come so that we can administer this from home rather than having to spend another 2 weeks in the joint. Its looking like we should be able to but will have to take him back toward the end of the 2 weeks so that they can do another bronchoscopy and take out the PICC line. But bringing him home for at least a week would definitely be the preferable option, even if it means being house bound until the antibiotics are done. I guess we'll see.

I'm so happy that we did the surgery. I was nervous and less than optimistic about how effective it would be, but I can see and hear a difference and the hope is that he will just continue to improve. There is still a lot of inflammation and soreness in his airways from all of the coughing and labored breathing for the past several months, but things finally seem to be getting better, and with the antibiotics hopefully there will be even more improvement.

Our computer is back in the shop so I'm just using shared ones to post an update here and there. I'll try to give more updates complete with pictures and descriptions as I get them. Thanks so much for all of the thoughts and prayers - they have and will continue to help Drew and us get through all of this!