Today was semi-eventful. Tomorrow, Monday, is the big day. In preparation for that, they took Emma's ventilator down a little - it was forcing her to take a minimum of 15 breaths per minute. She breathed over that for most of the day, which is good. They also changed her sedation. She woke up at 4 am WIDE OPEN, and her sweet nurse Angie sat with her to keep her company and also to make sure she didn't grab one of the many tubes and wires that surround her. Later in the morning, Emma wasn't rowdy, but she was very awake for about 3 hours - she was looking at people, listening, following with her eyes, squeezing people's fingers, and moving her legs a little. They actually ended up giving her some meds to get her to rest.

Later in the day, they changed her pain medication to a constant drip that will leave her system in about 30 minutes after you cut off the drip. That way, when they try to take her off the vent tomorrow, if she doesn't breathe well, they can't blame it on any medication. But today they had to increase the amount of that medication PLUS give her another one because she was even getting fiesty on those. She's a fighter, big time. They stopped her feeding tube this afternoon because they want her stomach empty; if she spits up tomorrow off the vent, she could possibly aspirate some of it back into her lungs, which are unstable anyway.

Which leads me to this point: we can already see many inherited traits in Emma. She has a combination of my blonde hair with Russell's grandmother's hair; she has my eyes; she has Russell's nose and mouth. She has Russell's toes. The last couple of days have shown us, though, that she has two of her great-grandmothers' fiestiness. These two great-grandmothers are no longer with us, but we can see them in the way that Emma sleeps with one eye open and fights sleep so that she doesn't miss anything (like Russell's Mama Dot); we see them in the way that she fights and fights to get her way (like Mama Dot and my Mama Parris - Mary Audrey, one of Emma's namesakes). I know that these two women are looking down and pointing their fingers at her (like they both always used to do) and saying, "Now that's my little girl. You tell them just exactly what you want." They try to get Emma's arms down under her blankets so that she doesn't pull on her tubes, but she always manages to sneak those arms out. A second nurse called her Houdini tonight.

So anyway, tomorrow they're going to see if she can breathe on her own without a ventilator. There's some confusion about whether the vent will stay in but off until she needs it for a little while or if they'll just completely take it out and see what happens. Neither scenario sounds pleasant. Russell and I just don't know if we can sit in the room with all those doctors and nurses and just wait on her stop breathing again. We have no idea if they'll just keep her off the vent if she is breathing but still isn't breathing well. We don't know what's going to happen tomorrow, but there may be a conversation about another surgery at the end of it.

In the meantime, here's a picture of Houdini doing whatever she wants with her arm. Before I took this picture, her arm wasn't actually resting on the bed, it was just suspended over her head while she was sleeping. Hilarious, considering they were TRYING to sedate her.