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We do always love coming home. One of these days we'll not have to go to LA as much and we will be grateful for that also.

Last night we drove down to our dear friends George and Lory and stayed with them (thank you thank you thank you!). That was real nice because they told us we had to be at the hospital at 6am...we didn't want to drive at 4am...what was even better was that prior to leaving Bako-land a gal from the hospital called and said, you don't need to get there at 6am...you'll just hang out for an hour and do nothing when she isn't scheduled until 7:30am for her CT scan...so you should just arrive at the hospital and go directly to radiology at 7am. What a blessing!!! Mia ended up sleeping really well in her borrowed pack-n-play from her boyfriend Jacob. (Thank you Jacob!) And at 6am I got her up to give her her seizure medicine and she fell back asleep until 6:45 when we left for the hospital. She did great waiting for the whole process to happen. Thank you for praying for that!

After some confusion about her CT scan, it was determined (unexpectedly to us) that she would actually need to be intubated (have a breathing tube) for the CT scan. This is because in addition to lying completely still, she would need to have her breath held for her also. This is because they need to measure the distance from her ribs to the blood vessels on her heart so that they don't accidentally damage them during surgery. Since a baby can't lie still and hold their breath they needed to sedate her and have the breathing machine hold her breath for her. Amazing what they can do with technology! She needed an IV first though and they did it while she was awake, but they got it on the second try, so we were very thankful for that. And then because of the breathing tube she had to have general anesthesia which takes a bit longer to wake up/recover from...so we ended up not finishing their until about 10:30. But she did really well and there were not any complications. Thank you God!

We left there to go and have a chest x-ray and an EKG...all of which were fairly simple and even though there was crying (because now she fears almost anyone who touches her...who wouldn't?), there wasn't hurting for those things. They still needed to get some blood from her to do a bood type check and so I made the mistake of asking them to call the heart surgeon's office and ask if this could be done prior to her surgery when she was out because they tried when she was out from the CT scan, but weren't able to draw any blood. They told me it needed to be done before the surgery so they could have the blood products ready to go the night before...(she's had how many surgeries already at UCLA and they still need to check her blood type????? That's what I was thinking...but apparently it is a legal requirement after a certain amount of time has lapsed since the last check...legalities can be so frustrating!) Well, they then told me at the lab that it would need to be a full blood draw and not just a heal stick or a finger prick...and that did not make us happy. I asked them why we couldn't have done this in Bakersfield when she got her blood drawn for her labs and they told me that the blood type check has to be done at the hospital you are having surgery at...again, legalities. They then said, by the way, we want to change Mia's surgery date to this next Thursday (6 days from now) because her surgeon wants to leave the Wednesday before Turkey Day. At first I didn't think it was a huge deal, but after Brad and I discussed it, I realized it was a big deal because we had already made arrangements with different people about donating blood products directly for Mia. And it would mean more time off of work for Brad...so Brad called them back and after some discussion, the heart surgeon apologized and said he didn't realize that we'd lined up donors for Mia and that he would do the surgery on the scheduled date of November 25th and he'd just have someone else look after her the next day. What a relief that was! But the whole time we are thinking, what is God's will and so I am so grateful that we prayed about it before they called us to apologize because I feel like that was a direct answer to prayer. And ultimately we know that regardless of what day the surgery is on, God will be there.

So, after all of that, we headed back to Bako-land...please pray for Mia, when they intubated her it has caused her throat to be a bit sore and she's had a hard time taking much food today, pray that it will heal quickly and she'll be drinking/eating a lot better tomorrow! And thank you for praying for today, overall it went really well.

Oh...I didn't mention about the blood type...we decided to wait to have Mia poked until the day before her surgery when we go down to LA, we just thought she had already been through too much and we didn't want her to have to be poked today...so pray that they are able to do that quickly when it happens!