For those of you whom we missed on the email. . . .

Cory's email to family and friends Tuesday evening. . .


Hello family and friends,

I just got off the phone with Corinne. Here's a summary of how everything has gone over the past 24 hours (sorry if this is review for some of you).

Corinne, Sawyer and Mom Isaak got to the hospital yesterday at 9:00. Sawyer's surgery was scheduled for 11:20 but the surgery before his was taking longer than expected. Sawyer was getting quite cranky but settled down nicely right around 11:20. Not a coincidence from our perspective! Sawyer was taken into surgery at 1:15. It took the doctors more than 2 hours to get an arterial line set up (it was eventually set up by a cardiac doctor that they called in). Although the surgery was only scheduled to take about an hour and 15 minutes the doctor only came out at about 5:00 to let Corinne know that everything had gone well. She finally got to see Sawyer at 7:40, a very long time from all of our perspectives.

Sawyer is doing well. The surgery was successful in that the doctor was even able to do an additional step in the surgery that is purely cosmetic and only done if things are going well. He did not need a blood transfusion and came out of the anesthetic well. He drank 4oz of sugar water immediately after getting back to his room and also had three 4oz bottles through the night (without showing any signs of nausea) which is a great sign.

The swelling has also been relatively low so far. Although it's hard to tell under the bandages his face has not swollen too much yet. The nurses say that his eyes may swell shut today which would be hard but it hasn't happened yet (here's hoping it doesn't). His pain has seemed reasonable. They did give him some extra morphine last night when his heart rate was rising a bit but that seemed to be effective and he relaxed quite soon after. He's been doing normal baby things like shaking his toys and enjoying Corinne playing with him. His heart rate has also been going down when she sings to him which is very cool.

Today Corinne and Sawyer are mostly relaxing. Sawyer is sleeping (usually in Corinne's arms or holding onto her hand) and resting and eating well. He's starting to tug on the gauze covering the top of his head and itching his face a bit (itching is normal after anesthetic and while on morphine). At the time I'm writing this message the doctor hasn't been by to check on Sawyer today.

I have some pictures from yesterday that I thought I'd share with you all. It's just a shutterfly link, so I hope it works for all of you. Click here to go to the shutterfly album. I've attached a few pictures from the album in case it doesn't work for you.

Thanks for your thoughts and prayers. Please feel free to email this message to anyone that I've missed (I'm not working from a list so it's certainly possible that I missed lots of people).

Peace, and apologies for the long email,

-COry (for Corinne and the boys)