I have a really good excuse....

For being tardy with my Henry update.

We ended up in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) at CHOP on Friday afternoon.

Henry was scheduled to have a sedated CAT scan and MRI first thing Friday morning and we were expecting to be picked up about Noon and to leave Philly to head home early Saturday morning...

Then the doc came out into the waiting area about 9am to tell me they had a very difficult time intubating Henry... His airway was incredibly tiny and the several tries needed to get the breathing tube in irritated his airway so much that he would need to be taken up to the PICU for steroid treatment to lower the swelling before he could be extubated.

So instead of finishing up my week, I started to truly experience Good Friday.

I am posting from my phone and it will only let me do one pic each post, so at the end is what Henry looked like sedated and on the breathing tube yesterday...

Except for once every hour when the sedation ran out and he freaked and started and tried to roll over and pull the breathing tube out while silently screaming...

Until 2 nurses held him down while a 3rd put him back under again.

It was brutal.

It went on for about 8 hours.

Until about 10pm when he was having more trouble breathing than earlier and an x-ray showed that the breathing tube was too high and was partially stuck in his cleft palate...

The original plan was to re-paralyze him and re-place the breathing tube until a more senior ENT doc could be there in the morning to supervise the extubation...

But 15 minutes later another doc said that Henry seemed strong enough to just ditch the breathing tube NOW...

So people started POURING into our little half of a shared PICU room... At least 9 docs, nurses and respiratory techs were crammed in and the extubation began...

It was a really brutal 15 minutes.

But it resulted in Henry breathing on his own with oxygen through a regular nasal canula...

I must thank my family and many friends (especially those on Facebook Friday night at 10:30pm) who rallied in prayer!!!

We are looking at another night in the PICU while he is weaning off meds and oxygen and hopefully discharge on Easter Sunday!!

And then coming back to CHOP on April 15 for a surgery on April 16...

And on that note I will cruelly make you wait a bit more for the next update....

Remember us in your prayers at the Easter Vigil!!!!