Building Character

Elise’s mom here… Just for the record we are still looking at Elise and saying WOW. What a challenging, complicated and marvelous process this is. 

The quick skinny - she’s making progress each day. Breathes completely on her own, is allowed some hospital food, and walks once a day pushing the most interesting contraption to carry her tubes, monitors and IV lines. She is absolutely determined to spend the shortest time in ICU she can. Still has multiple access lines for different kinds of medications and procedures and as you can imagine she is quite sleep deprived.

There are some more hurdles until she is considered stable enough to be moved to a progressive care unit but she has started calling each of these bars “Building Character”. Our Sweet Girl does not shy away from the challenge.

•  Need a new access port for a procedure because the first one stopped working? Bring it!

• A line of hospital staff waiting outside your door to do the next treatment or procedure even though you are exhausted? Let’s do it.

• One of the providers reaching to yank a wire or tube before you can take a deep breath? Fine.

Elise is handling it all and showing everyone she’s got this!

Her surgeon called her a Rock Star this morning. We could not agree more!

❤️- Karyn

Ps: The picture is her Christmas elves outside ICU.