He is huge

We are at the tail end of week thirty-four, and Flynn’s head is measuring at forty weeks, his body at thirty-eight weeks developed. If we actually keep him squozen up in there for the next seventeen days, by my math that should make his head forty-two weeks, his body forty and beyond. He will be nearly as big as Sparrow when she was born, and she was two weeks late.

His physical exam, so far as they can examine someone who’s hidden in a lightless sack of warm water,  comes out 8/8, whatever that means. He is perfect in every way with this one exception: he has  a whole lot of liver in his chest. He has a lot of hair, and he looks just like Sparrow: button nose, stubborn face. He was slumbering at this week’s usual ultrasounds, so they used a buzzer on him, which startled him to no end and got him to thrusting around for whatever had scared him.

They have their blog up and running  over at the Fetal Care Institute, and we’re the fourth entry on it -- Preparing To Help A Baby With CDH. It is strange to read about one’s son as an anonymous baby boy about to undergo an almost science-fictional procedure. Stranger still to read that that thirty, thirty medical professionals will be in the room and that they have done two days of practicing at two different hospitals.

Real DiscoveryHealth channel stuff. I recall some show where they were delivering octuplets or something equally unlikely, and if memory serves a team of thirty or forty were on hand, and I thought to myself, How do they all fit in there? What do they all do? I find it even more alarming now.

I get chills: in 413 hours as I write this I will be sitting in a waiting room feeling sick at my stomach, as sick as I ever have. When the nurse called me after the really minor procedure on Bonnie (and a risky one for Flynn) I cried, because I had been terrified of losing them both. Imagine what I will feel now.

I cannot imagine. Just breathe, breathe, breathe.  Friday Bonnie goes to St Louis to stay for thirty-five days.

So long. And it will not be over, even then.

But my son is a big boy. He will need every inch and ounce.