What a week it has been...

Hi Everyone,

Sorry this post is so belated; I know a few of you out there have been waiting to hear what the hell happened last week. Here is the story:

On Wednesday 2/25 we went in to Boston for a standard appointment just to check in and make sure everything was progressing as it should... Well, as it turns out things were starting to progress as they shouldn't. The ultrasound showed that Erin had "funneling" in her cervix. Basically, her cervix was starting to shorten and open. While this may not have been immediately dangerous, if allowed to continue it would likely have lead to pre-term labor and other things that we didn't want to have happen. The solution to this was a surgical procedure called a cervical cerclage which involves putting a stitch around the cervix to keep it from opening any further, and ideally reverse some of the funneling. In this situation the sooner the procedure could be done, the better, so off we went to be admitted and got ready for a long night... Our appointment had started around 4:00 Wednesday afternoon. Erin was finally in surgery just after 10:00 that night. She came out around 11:00 and I was able to get up to see her in recovery by 11:30. We finally settled into a room just after 1:00 Thursday morning and started to get some sleep around 2:00. We saw another doctor on Thursday and had another ultrasound done at 11:00 to see how things looked then. Everything seemed to be ok, so we were released and made it home just after 1:00 in the afternoon.

Now the good news, the surgery went extremely well and everyone came out ok. This past Wednesday, 3/4 we went back in to see what the final results of the surgery were. Things are looking good at this point. There have been no problems stemming from the surgery, and the funneling seems to have been partially reversed. The trade-off, however, is that Erin is now on modified bedrest for the duration of the pregnancy. Luckily, in this case she doesn't have to actually stay in bed all day, but can hang out on the couch and watch TV and use the newly installed wi-fi connection on her brand-spanking-new laptop. She's told her limit is about 5 minutes of being up and moving out of every hour. This sounds extreme, but the times when she's needed to be up for much longer than that (making trips to Boston for instance) she can feel the difference and becomes quite uncomfortable. She has now survived her first full week on bedrest, and while not happy about it, is starting to adjust. She welcomes visitors almost any time, since I'm still working and gone for a significant portion of the day. She's also getting plenty of milage out of our phone plan and her laptop (thank goodness for wi-fi). Many people have also been extremely generous providing meals since, as most of you know, Erin does the cooking around here for very good reason.

Other news around here is that Whitney's actually made it back and living about 2 minutes away. We're all happy to have her around to pawn work off onto... We feel very lucky to have so many friends and family all offering support in their various ways. No doubt the road ahead will continue to be challenging, but we feel we've cleared one major obstacle, and with so many others helping, we're confident in our ability to make it through to the other side. Thank you all.

-Chris