Perspective

Dear Ellie,

It's amazing how a catastrophe can make all of your other problems look tiny.  How it puts them into perspective.  Yesterday, after it appeared that you had weathered the episode without any lasting damage, we couldn't feel anything but relief.  It didn't matter to us that you were back on the ET tube and ventilator or that your trachea might be scarred or that you had fallen back, yet again, to the place you were a week ago.  You are alive, which is an infinitely better outcome than what we thought a few hours before.

But now that you are back to your old self again, those "smaller" problems that we'd forgotten about are now back in focus.  You've almost reached the two month mark, and that's the point that you really, really need to be off of the ventilator.  Your respirator support is still quite high, so the idea of moving you off onto CPAP again is unlikely to happen unless there is some kind of steroid dose.  Then again, you could always yank the endotracheal tube out again, which would give you your second chance.  Everyone seems to think that you wouldn't have lasted much longer on CPAP anyway.  I wonder whether that's true...