Saturday – 10:28am

Sally’s had an IV line going into her neck since 7:30am last Thursday. Initially it ran all the way through her heart, doing something important. They removed that after surgery in the ICU and I was amazed at how long the cord was, it was every bit of four feet.

Three lines have remained in her neck since then and have been used to inject medicine, draw blood and keep Sally from getting poked by a needle again (I’ll include a photo of her wrists that will show you just how hard of a beat down she’s been through).

To say that these neck IV lines are important would be an understatement, they’ve been her lifeline, her security blanket and the portal in which the nurses and doctors can work in seconds if they’ve needed to help her, and they have.

But they are out. Just a few minutes ago two nurses came in and carefully removed them. She has a few stitches in her neck and a dressing, but the IV is gone.

In case you haven’t put two and two together… this means Sally is being discharged!

We’re still waiting for Dr. Humar to come put his eyeballs on her and give the green light. All the nurses are coming to say goodbye to their favorite patient, and I’ve practiced changing a dressing that we’ll have to keep up with over the next two to three months.

It’s actually a bit unnerving. It’s hard to leave the safety of having a full team watching Sally’s every move and vital sign, knowing that there’s an operating room and incredible surgeons just a few floors away. But that’s why we did this. That’s why Sally made this choice and went through all this torture.

To get better.

It’s hard to even imagine that’s what’s going to happen because you kind of get used to getting your butt kicked once it starts happening nonstop. But we’ve been saying that there’s light at the edge of this storm, and the Lord has made his promise to not give us more than we can handle, and we’ve dreamed of a life without managing an incredibly difficult, hard to understand autoimmune disease.

So here we are, looking down the road. The old liver in the rear view mirror, a new life ahead.

And it’s never felt more like anything is possible than it does right now.

She made it, she made it, she made it, she made it, she made it!