The thing I found about repeatedly asking “are we nearly there yet? ” on all those family holidays was that if I asked it enough, eventually,  one of the responses of “oh yes,  nearly”, would actually be the case.

And so, finally, at long last, 4 months to the day since Savanah unexpectedly entered the world, the hospital doors look like they’re about to be flung open and a departure is looking imminent!!!

With some encouraging noises over the last few days about hitting the 6th March deadline, it had been suggested that we would room-in at the hospital during the first weekend in March (where we get to go solo looking after SJ from a bedroom on the unit but with the safety blanket of knowing that there’s a room full of medical staff on the other side of the door if we need them),  ready to check out by the 6th.  As if that wasn’t exciting enough,  in an even more sudden surge of progress, having given the nurses the OK to bottle feed SJ overnight from last night onwards,  it turns out that she took to it like a duck to water and started feeding from it without a hesitation. And with that, came the announcement that the whole depature plan can be shifted forward!

Sooo….with the combination of boob and bottle now able to satiate Savannah’s appetitie, out came her feeding tube this afternoon. From a bank of pumps and pipes, dutifully pumping all manner of things into her via a cobweb of tubes and canulars inserted all over her teeny body,  to nothing but a couple of prongs of oxgen in her nose and an ikkle infared probe on her foot to measure her saturation. Having already been told that SJ will be coming home on oxygen and with everything else now removed from her (tubewise….the organs etc are all still in place as they should be!), there’s very little standing between us and the door now.

And here she is almost entirely tubeless…

We know all too well that there’s no guarantees of timing’s in hospital land but with a final sleep study currently underway to decide the level of o2 to send SJ home on, oxygen installation at our house provisionally booked in for Thursday or Friday and us likely to room-in over the weekend it’s looking like SJ-Day could be a soon as this Monday.  Cripes…we might actually nearly be there! There aren’t words to describe our excitement right now.