05/04/2025
Our family has gone from staring at heart monitors to celebrating milestones. Many of the tubes and wires that tethered Owen to machines have since been removed. We’re down to just a few attachments, and now, holding him is a completely different experience. He’s eagerly drinking his milk and regularly letting out loud cries, which means his vocal cords and his strength is back. In fact, he’s doing so well that just a few hours ago, we were moved out of the ICU and into a step‑down room which means he’s considered stable enough to need less intensive care.
If he continues to feed well and gain weight, he might be discharged soon! We know that leaving the hospital doesn’t mean the journey is over, but it will mark the end of this chapter of hospital life. Owen still has a hypoplastic left ventricle, a bicuspid aortic valve and a stenotic mitral valve that just barely scraped by from needing surgery at the moment. But today, our son has a much healthier aortic arch and a much brighter future than we previously thought. All of these ‘wins’ represent the countless prayers – your prayers, our prayers, prayers of people we will never even meet – that have gotten us to this point.
A passage that I keep coming back to is Psalm 126 – it talks about those who sow in tears reaping with joy, and it describes a scene where God’s people, after a hard season, find themselves laughing and celebrating because of His deliverance. We feel like we’re starting to live that out. There were a lot of tears sown in the ICU – tears on our pillows at night, tears over Owen’s bed, tears in each other’s arms when we didn’t know how things would turn out. Now, as things have improved, we find sprouts of joy emerging. Earlier this week, we were both laughing so hard that we had to remind ourselves that we’re still in a hospital. If you’re still sowing in tears, hold tight—joy’s roots run deep, and God never wastes a single teardrop.
