The Journey of James Weston

Thursday, December 16th, 2021 Continuing to do 1 hour of eye patching a day. It's a struggle but we get it done. We pull out all the stops as far as distractions! Mom managed to get through another day with no nursing, handling both day and night shifts. We found out from being in the hospital that it's only possible to do about 6 days of that until the body begs for more sleep. It's also a dangerous situation when someone always need to have their eyes on James 24/7. James is really mastering his bouncer. The bigger he gets, the easier it is for him to touch the ground. He loves to grab and hit anything near him. So we'll have to be careful with our Chihuahua Tommy. P.S. James' 1st Birthday is coming up! Wouldn't it be fun for James to read an email from you when he is older? What a treasure! His email is JamesWestonAbramowitz@gmail.com. How awesome to get his reply back in like 10 years...

Wednesday, December 15th, 2021 No nurse for the rest of the week since our M, W, F nurse is on vacation. Dad and Mom made the trip with James to the hospital for his Speech Therapy PO Evaluation.  Speech-language pathologists evaluate a patient's communication, thinking processes, and swallowing abilities. Therapy provides patients with skills to improve their attention, memory, reasoning, and understanding of language and speaking, as well as helps patients eat and swallow safely. While at the hospital, we ran into one of James' Occupational Therapists. He has grown some in the last few months! During our appointment the Speech Therapist tested James' ability to swallow by allowing him to take some water from a spoon. This was his first time using a spoon and he loved it. Mom does do oral care with James at home which is using a sponge qtip dipped in sterile water. It was always really hard to tell whether or not he was swallowing. The next step would be a swallow study. H...

Tuesday, December 14th, 2021 Today was the first time Juju was able to see what home health nursing is like. Our Tuesday nurse is great with James, always giving him attention and helping with PT. We deflated his cuff for an hour so that Juju could hear him make some noise but James did not want to talk. He still held great tidal volumes the whole time! James has been belly laughing so hard sometimes pausing the ventilator. Even though we can't hear him you can tell by the photos! Mom tried to get his liquid Calcium Carbonate refilled but if course there was an issue. So this is an OTC med, that you can't buy over the counter. 🤷🏻‍♀️ So insurance won't cover it, in fact they're asking for much higher price then the over the counter price. Our local Publix is so good, much better than CVS in Mom's opinion. They immediately saw that we were going to get overcharged and decided to give us the prescription for the OTC cost instead which was $12 vs $90. They are going t...

Monday, December 13th, 2021 James loved playing peek-a-boo with Juju. Check out the video below! He is really good with covering himself up and taking off the blanket as well. James gets so excited he has to be reminded to keep breathing.  We enjoyed a home made chicken pot pie 🥧 from Cathy and watched Die Hard on the wall projector 📽️. Our conclusion and unpopular opinion is that it should not be considered as a Christmas movie.  Always laughing and smiling! Trying out his new kicks!

Sunday, December 12th, 2021 Juju arrived in the afternoon. Unfortunately Aunt Robin wasn't feeling well so she stayed back with the dogs. 🐾 Hoping they can all make the trip for his birthday in 2 weeks! James had a relaxing bath. He is almost getting too big for this baby tub! The tricky part is we don't have a regular bathtub downstairs, just a walk-in shower. We will see! We have been adding baking soda to help with his diaper rash. His favorite part of the bath is getting wrapped up in a towel at the end!

Saturday, December 11th, 2021 Today our M, W, F nurse decided to get in some extra hours and work from 7:30am until 12:30pm. Mom and Dad wrapped Christmas presents. Normally we would go to Jacksonville for the holidays but we are not set up to travel overnight yet. Cardinals came to visit James at the window. James' new trick is shaking toys in the air to hear the rattle. Not just hitting them on the bed. You tend to notice every development being there 24/7. Tomorrow family comes into town.

Friday, December 10th, 2021 James had PT at 8am, but when she arrived at 8:15am James was not about it. We worked with him in his bed. Teaching him how to sit up and lie down on his own by rolling on his side and leaning on his arms.  Around 12:30am, Mom jumped up to the sound of the vent being disconnected. The loud train whistle started before the ventilator alarm even started beeping. She immediately grabbed his trach and started feeling each section until she felt something disconnected. There it was, she could feel the air swishing out at the end of the blue Tee adapter after the Y (you can see in the pictures). But the tubing was not there to reconnect. It had happened again. This time Mom was again in the dark and could not find the new mobile light. It's great because it holds a charge but it's also always in a different place because you can put it anywhere. Unfortunately Mom could not find it had to make a quick decision to not continue looking for it and to walk arou...