How you can help

Hi all,

I will report in more on Lucas tonight.  To note, he is doing well.  Better than Dr. Tom the attending ECMO doctor had thought possible in 24 hours.  Better than Dr. Christine (who has more titles than address information on her card) would have believed.  So he is pulling back steadily from the brink.

At any case I will get into the details later.  He is not out of the woods but, thankfully we are becoming more boring to the residents and fellows at Children's NICU .

For the most part I want to do a quick write-up as to how the mom, I, and the rest of our family are doing.

Children's Hospital is brilliantly designed and obviously come from a society with a lot of love and hope behind them.  For that reason they created a family area above the NICU on the 5th floor of "Train".  (They separate out the buildings by cool sculptures and themes.  So there is whale, giraffe, rocket, etc...)

The Mom and I have a little room here that they provided for free.  Its about the size of a hotel room you would find in Italy.  Meaning its a closet with a bed. Which is perfectly fine, we can sleep there and hide away if we feel like it.  They provide showers, towels, bedding, parking, a bunch of $5 dollar meal tickets for the Mom, and we even got her a free massage.  So they are awesome.

Our daughter is being taken care of by the Mom's parents and they will be here until Dec 15th.  After that my mom comes into town on the 17th and will be here as long as we need her.  So we are easily covered for 8 weeks with help from our extended family.  My sisters have offered to fly out, which is a very loving gesture but... insane, they have their own families.  Thank you sisters, you are much loved but, we can't have you generously sacrificing unless we have no other options.

We have had lots of fantastic offers to help out with food trains, places to stay, back rubs, in general an phenomenal out-pouring of support from our friends, neighbors, and many others.  We absolutely appreciate it and the Mom is selectively going about organizing what would need to be done.  For the most part, right now, we don't know what needs to be done.  What we are watching for is when Lucas comes off of ECMO.  Its easy to forget that while he is stable and improving and making us happy.  He is still having 5 times his normal blood volume pumped through a machine that replaces his lungs and heart.  There is always the risk of infection and clots which they are well trained at but, this is still a huge risk that can change everything in 1 minute.

So until we get past ECMO we really don't know what the recovery plan is.  And until we know what the recovery plan is we don't really know how to use all of your help and support.

Here are a couple of things that do help.
1) We like cards.  You can send them to our house
Lucas Paulin, 7017 28th Ave, Seattle WA 98117

2) This is going to cost a lot.  I have no idea how much and hopefully it will somehow be mostly covered by insurance.  But, it will be expensive and as much as I hate to think about money it will always be there.  So you can always help us that way.   To address this I setup this paypal acct and the following "donate" button will do the rest.  My plan is to only use this money to pay for the medical bills associated with Lucas's birth.  If by some freakish miracle we have more money than we needed I'm going to find a way to donate it to some aspect of Children's Hospital.  Maybe there is a fund for underfunded families, or something.  Anyway, I can assure you that this will go to helping someone.



So there it is, feel free to use it if you want.  The Mom will find you if there is something specific we need.

Just to let you guys see our world, here are some pictures I took of where we are right now.  This I call the "family room" where they have magazines, TV's and a really good view of a new wing being built for Children's medical.

This we refer to as the "Library"

They have lots of medical books for families to learn more about what is going on, counselors and some cool plastic models of organs that I will be showing to his sister later today.

Finally here is a picture of the new wing being built.  Its actually pretty touching because the workers spray painted the names of children on the I-Beams.  Super cool guys.

As heart breaking as this place is, it is a miracle making place where you hear a lot of foreign languages.  So people must be coming from all over and the magic these doctors work make us that much luckier to live within 30 minutes.

More about Lucas later....