Welcome Home Colby

After 18 days between Providence Park, Survival Flight, Motts Pediatric Cardiovascular Thoraic Unit, open heart surgery and General Care on Motts 5 East, Jessica and I were able to welcome home our son. The ink is drying on the first chapter in Colby's brand new life story and what a crazy, scary, emotional, rollercoaster of a chapter it was. If you put a number of chapters together you get a story. April 15th, as I sat in the special care unit about 15 mins after Colby was born, I wondered how many chapters would be written in this life story and would this story end before it really began. But soon after these thoughts things began to change and within the next 24 hours we would meet some of the most incredible people I've ever been in contact with. Through their information and knowledge, these amazing people began to write the pages that were the "Heart" of this chapter. They overwhelmed us with any and all information, set our minds at ease, performed their jobs, and then cared their butts off! They set the tone for this first chapter and hopefully what will be an entire story. They took what could have been a tragic chapter and a short story and flipped it over into a chapter about Colby's strength, will and fight and a long and healthy life story. Also helping to write this chapter were all of you, our family and friends. Through everything and anything you did for us, all of the well wishes, texts, phone calls, visits, prayers, emails, messages, cards, generous gift cards for food, home cooked meals, dog watching, Coop watching, lawn mowing, house decorating, you helped us through. We wouldn't have been able to get through all of this without your support, THANK YOU SO MUCH!

We know Colby was mentioned in many churches throughout the area in the past couple weeks and we just wanted to say thank you. We also wanted to give a couple special thanks for a couple extra special prayers. To Jessica's cousin Chris, who happened to be on a fabulous trip over seas said a prayer for Colby at the Western Wall, or Wailing Wall as its often called, in Jerusalem. Also to our friends Randy and Cat who lit a candle for Colby at St. Patrick's Cathedral on their trip to New York. I also wanted to say thanks to our friends Brian and Kelly Syska who gave Colby a rosary blessed by Pope John Paul II. We kept that on his bed his entire stay.

Well we hope the next couple chapters of Colby's life story are pretty bland and normal, this one chapter was enough drama for an entire novel. Talk about hearts, I don't know if mine can take another episode like this one. I think everything happens for a reason and I don't know yet why this incident happened but I think someday I will. All I know is that when Colby is old enough to understand we'll look back on all this and make sure he knows how many people were behind him. I just saw a cheesy commercial for some medical tv show and the tagline for the show was "all patients deserve a hero", Colby had quite a few in the past few weeks.