My Heart

The title of this post is two-fold. First, and foremost, my heart now belongs to a little man named Hadley Max Lewis. He has completely stolen every bit of it and filled it with the most amazing feelings of love and happiness and contentment I could ever know. I never knew before that it was possible to feel so completely infatuated with someone so little and so new. I could spend hours just looking at him and holding him and cuddling him. I am amazed every time I look at him by the fact that we did this...Eric and I...we did this. Wow! He is part me and part Eric. What an amazing thing. And then God gave us this perfect little being to love and cherish and take care of. It just makes me wonder what I ever did to be worthy of such an amazing gift. My heart is overflowing.

The second meaning of the title actually has to do with my physical heart. Some of you know about the goings on of the past week and some of you don't, so I will try to give a brief summary of them. Last weekend I begin to feel like I was getting a chest cold. I got a cough and was having a little trouble breathing and my chest felt congested, so I began taking some cough medicine. By Sunday I was really struggling to catch my breath and at times struggling to just take a breath. So Eric finally convinced me to go to the emergency room. Luckily, my sister was here and stayed with Hadley while we went for what we thought might be a couple hours. That couple hours turned into three days spent in the hospital. After doing breathing treatments, an EKG, a CT scan, multiple blood tests, and who knows what else, they discovered that I was experiencing congestive heart failure due to the massive amounts of fluid in my body (see earlier posts regarding swelling), my greatly elevated blood pressure, and fluid filling up my lungs. So Sunday night I was admitted in the ICU where I stayed until Tuesday afternoon. During that time I had lots more blood work, lots of medicine, an echo-cardiogram, and had about 15 pounds of fluid drained out of my body. Needless to say, it was not the best way to spend a couple days. On Tuesday afternoon I finally got moved into a regular hospital room and was able to see Hadley for the first time since Sunday. Not seeing him was probably the hardest part of this entire ordeal for me! Late Wednesday afternoon I was finally released from the hospital and came home where I have not spent much time away from my little man since. (I had to make up for the days spent away from him!)

On Thanksgiving Day we had a house full of people from both Eric's family and mine, and we had a great time together. This Thanksgiving we definitely have a lot to be thankful for.