Planning for discharge!

We are once again gearing up to head home! The plan is if there are no changes over the weekend in Sam, then we get to leave Monday. He has been good for a couple of days, with only one incident yesterday morning. I was afraid it was fluid again and his lungs were wet, but his xray and labs looked stable, so we are assuming it has something to do with his morning gagging and feeds. The only thing we do to manage these episodes here is increase oxygen and maybe give diuretics early, which is something we could do at home. We are also adjusting his feedings and diuretics schedule to try to help decrease these episodes from happening. This morning was a little better, and I'm hoping tomorrow will be even better with a little more tweaking. So as of now, we are packing, planning flights, prescriptions, and all the other thousands of things required to be done to get us home! We will not be able to fly out until early Monday evening because getting discharged before noon is probably not going to happen. We also have to pull his pic line early monday morning and watch him for a few hours after. So, we will be getting into louisville around 10 or 11 and will decide based on Sam if we will just stay the night there or drive on home. I am so ready to be home :)   We will not be able to do anything for Thanksgiving or his birthday this year, but as long as we are home and together I will be thrilled. The docs say it usually takes a good 8 to 10 weeks post op for the heart to settle out and relax after this type of surgery, we are only going in to week 4 for Sam. So even though he is doing well and we get to come home, this is still a very critical period for him. We have also always been home before this time of year and are very nervous about sickness and respiratory stuff that goes around. Though we are not usually too particular about keeping him in or having people around us, we have been told that this time it is absolutely necessary and very important. I hope everyone can understand the situation and not be upset that we cannot have visitors. We would love to see everyone, but it is just not safe. We truly appreciate all of your love and support and want you to know we could not make it through all of this without all our friends and family.