Six Silly Things She Does (12 Days of CNY)

 

If you've been following Lena's story on facebook these last few months, you've watched the roller-coaster of getting her heart fixed go up and down and up and down again. First she went into surgery here in Beijing, but before the surgeon opened her up he ran a few more tests and discovered some things that made him very uncomfortable operating on her. There was no way that she would survive, the doctors agreed, and so after staying in the ICU overnight, Lena was released from the hospital.

 

We don't settle with "impossible" and so we started researching other options. After consulting with a number of heart surgeons overseas, we found a surgeon in Shanghai who felt like he could operate successfully on Lena's heart, and do the first-of-may heart surgeries. She traveled to Shanghai in January and had surgery on the 24th. It was successful for two hours, until she suddenly became extremely unstable and had to be rushed back into surgery to basically undo what the surgeon had just done. Lena quickly stabilized. We are so thankful for the doctors who were able to accurately asses Lena's situation and we are thankful for her life... but we are also sad.

 

We want Lena to have a long a full life. We want her lips to no longer be blue and we hate watching her little fingers and toes get more and more clubbed with every passing month. It breaks our hearts to hear her struggling for breath and it seems so wrong for a precious child to suffer so much.

 

But then we put together Lena's Before/Today photo collage and we see that she has already lived a miracle. She has already been saved. Her life is a testimony to the power of love and of joy. And maybe, for today at least, that's enough hope to hold on to.

 

Lena is a silly little girl. Her favorite thing to do is to rock in her car-seat. But she is also extremely ticklish, likes to stare at people, wears the cutest shoes when she's working on standing in physical therapy, rocks her head to music and shakes her head "no" to just about everything.

 

And she makes the funniest faces...

 

 

Let's keep her giggling.