Emma's Home

Yesterday, the 10 month journey to bring Emma home ended. Now a new journey begins. It was an emotional day yesterday as we said goodbye to Healthbridge. As excited as we were to be going home, it was sad to say goodbye to all of the people who have worked so hard to get Emma ready to come home. We were supposed to leave the hospital by 10:00 am, but we got a little delayed after all the goodbyes. We decided to give Emma one last feeding before we went home, so we didn’t leave until about 12:30. We arrived home about 1:00 and showed Emma her new home. Around 2:30, Emma’s home health nurse stopped by to train us on the new equipment and had us fill out a bunch of paperwork. Emma’s nurse happens to be the same nurse that took care of Alissa during her pregnancy when she was on bed rest. It was very exciting to know that our friend Angela would be taking care of us again. As the day progressed, we started to get a little bit nervous as we tried to use the equipment by ourselves for the first time and tried to figure out which medicines Emma got when. Thankfully, we had my mom here to give us an extra hand until 5:00. Emma went to bed around 8:30 and slept very well. She woke up only once in the night. I wish the same were true for her mom and dad. With it being her first night at home without nursing care, we were both anxious. Alissa went to bed about 11:00 while I stayed up and watched her on the video monitor until about 2:30. I couldn’t stay awake any longer, so I brought the monitor into our bedroom and we hoped that it would wake us up if there was a problem. After I went to sleep, Alissa got another couple hours sleep over the rest of the night. Hopefully we will be able to sleep more comfortably tonight. We’ve been told that the first 48 hours home are the toughest. We are so excited to be home with our little girl and cannot wait to see what this next chapter in our lives brings.