best-laid plans...
It certainly wasn't my intention to abandon this blog for over four months, but our life has been in an ongoing state of upheaval since my last entry, back in March. Sarah and I were just beginning to emerge from the chaos of moving and spring cleaning when we were plunged into a deeper and more profoundly unsettling chaos by the birth of our first child, Hannah Ray Bliss Bakker, on April 18 -- six weeks early.
Hannah was born with abdominal complications that required immediate surgery. She was airlifted to Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children from Peterborough the morning she was born, had surgery that night and has been recuperating in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit ever since. She has an annular pancreas, which means that her pancreas is wrapped around her duodenum, completely blocking the exit from her stomach. Her stomach was very distended at birth and she was throwing up large amounts of amniotic fluid. The surgeon has sewn part of her intestine to her stomach lining to create a new exit from her stomach into the intestine. Her bile duct is also in an odd place which means that her bile drains directly into her stomach instead of into her intestine as it should. Her biggest problem now is that she has a short intestine, probably because it was not receiving any stimulation while she was growing in the womb. This means that she can't digest breastmilk, or enough formula to meet her nutritional needs. She is fed a partial diet of pre-digested (i.e. broken down) formula through a tube directly into her stomach, and receives the rest of her nutrition intravenously, although this presents its own set of complications over the long term. All in all she's got a lot of complicated issues to deal with for someone so young.
But she is absolutely delightful. It is a joy to spend time with her every day. She is alert and we see more and more of her personality emerging all the time. This weekend she moved from the intensive care unit to the gastro-intestinal ward. She has her own room here, and one of us can spend the night with her. Sarah and I have taken responsibility for a great deal of her care, and we will be getting training to take on more. It looks as though Hannah will still be on intra-venous nutrition when she goes home and we will be getting some in-home medical support from community nurses, as well as continuing to consult closely with the team of doctors at "Sick Kids" who are managing her care. Our hope is that we will be discharged by Labour Day, so that Hannah will be able to enjoy late summer and fall on the farm.
This is certainly not how we anticipated spending our first summer as farm co-owners and as parents. I have been able to go back and forth to the farm (about a 1 1/2 - 2 hour drive) a bit to try and help out there, but Brian and Sylvia have had to shoulder the lion's share of the workload. They have been a tremendous source of support to us during this time, as have all of our family and friends. The garden is gorgeous, but our pastures need a lot of work. We bought hay for the winter from our neighbour and there have been a few areas where we have had to scale back our ambitions for this year. But the farm is very beautiful in the summer, in spite of the mosquitoes, and we can't wait to be there together as a family. We've been very fortunate to be able to stay at the Ronald McDonald House the entire time Hannah has been in the hospital, but the corner of Yonge and Gerrard in downtown Toronto just isn't the same as being home (although we've now lived there longer than we've lived on the farm).
Alan has made plans to buy a few more Kerry cows from the Rare Breeds Society and we also bought 20 Barred Plymouth Rock laying hens last week, so we are making some progress in a few areas. Our next goal is to develop a plan to revitalize our pastures and get the Ford 8N tractor running properly. At this point it seems to need a new clutch, although for a while there its catalog of ailments seemed to be changing almost daily.
One thing about hanging around a hospital for several months is that (if you're like me) you tend to get some reading done. I'm looking forward to using this blog more regularly in the future as a way of articulating our vision for the farm now that there is some light at the end of the tunnel, at least in terms of Hannah's initial hospital stay.
She, and we, will have a lot of hurdles to overcome as she grows and her body adapts to the challenges it faces. Your prayers will be appreciated.