Thursday, January 15, 2004 12:21 AM CST

Hi! Things have been busy here at UCSF, so I haven't had much of a chance to update. Paddy's at the Childlife playroom while I type, being entertained by a Childlife specialist, and Aidan's with his daddy in the ICU.

Aidan's surgery on Tuesday went well until the very end when the endoscope nicked a vein or capillary which caused some bleeding into his ventricles. It was not a lot, but because of it, they left his old shunt in and added a new one so that the blood could drain out along with the CSF. So now he has two externalized shunts. This means he has to lie quite still, and because of the blood they don't want to try clamping off the shunts until tomorrow. So we don't yet know if the surgery worked. If it did, he will have another surgery probably next Tuesday or Wednesday to remove all the hardware and he will go home shunt-free. The recovery time after this last surgery will probably be only about two days and then, perhaps, finally, he can go home!!

Last night Aidan decided to surprise everyone by running a high heartrate which is just starting to drop a little now. He was showing no other real symptoms and no one knows quite what to make of it. The high heartrate made him a little jumpy and he actually did not sleep at all last night. Literally. He acted like someone who'd drunk a little too much coffee. He kept chewing on his feeding tube and disconnecting his oxygen probe and pushing the buttons on his bed to make it tilt up and down. FUN!! In finally dozed a little in the early hours but I could hear the nurse come in periodically to tell him "No picking!" since he kept trying to pull the bandage off his head.

In general he is much calmer around the nurses than he was when we first got here. He lets them flush his IV and adjust his probes without screaming though sometimes he says loudly "All done!!" which means he wants them to back off.

Paddy and I stayed with Aidan last night so that Kevin could finally get a short but uninterrupted night's sleep at the Family House, since he has been rooming in at the PICU for a week now and really needed the sleep (and a shower). But not a shave yet; he wants to keep that hospital beard!

Our older kids are at home at Shaver Lake with their Alaskan grandma and grandpa. IT sounds like everything is going well there. We miss them, especially Aidan who when someone comes to draw blood or do something else unpleasant, says "Go see Liam!" or whatever other sibling he is thinking about. He will be overjoyed to be home again when it happens.

Thrilled to get a chance to write this out before Paddy starts looking for his mom, hmm, wonder if I should try to go take a shower now?