Hospital holiday day 7

Caleb has been awake all day today! All of his PICU friends and helpers have loved seeing glowing face and sparkly eye! Caleb is still hooked up to an EEG-he'll be hooked up for another day or so. Of course he isn't showing the computer any of his tricky moves, but hopefully we'll still get some good data. I haven't heard how his shunt series looked, but I'm assuming no news is good news. Caleb has had a fever today so tests are being done to see what the cause is. I consulted with a pediatric surgeon today about a Nissin/G tube surgery. Caleb's lungs show signs of chronic aspiration and the nissin would greatly help keep Caleb from aspirating anything he refluxes from his stomach. The surgery would entail wrapping a part of his stomach around his esophagus to tighten it up- then the g tube would allow us to feed Caleb through a hole strait into his stomach instead of the feeding tube through his mouth. I was hoping we wouldn't have to do this surgery, but I think it's in Caleb's best interest. Otherwise we just keep putting out fires without tackling the bigger problem. So far the plan is to hopefully get Caleb transferred to a trach/vent unit sometime tomorrow. We'll begin ventilator training which takes 3 days, and then hopefully we're on the road to home. The nissin/g tube surgery will likely happen at the end of January after he's had a few weeks to fully recover. The doctor suggested we bring Caleb home on a OJ tube (a tube that feeds Caleb right into his intestines, bypassing his stomach) so that we can avoid another aspiration before the surgery. The upside- we probably won't have to deal with Caleb spitting up. The downside- we'll have to have him on a continuous feeding and if the tube comes out, we have to have it put back in at the hospital. Luckily Caleb is always up for another grand adventure!