For those of you pulling for Jamie, I wanted to let you know that things are… weird. She had a surgery to basically reverse the original surgery that was supposed to repair her heart. They don’t know why the first surgery didn’t work, but their thinking was, “okay, that didn’t work, let’s go back to what was sort of working before.”

They also installed a right-heart pump at that time, in the hopes of getting her off the ECMO. So far, so good on that front– her bleeding is under control and even though she is still having assistance with her heart, they are able to dial down the machine a bit each day.

In the meantime, though, her lungs and her kidneys failed.

So she’s on dialysis, which might not be forever, but might be. My mom, whose a nurse, told me that “sometimes after the body endures a trauma like that, your kidneys just say ‘aw fuck it’ and stop working.” I hope that isn’t the bedside manner that she has for her patients .

The thing with her lungs turned out to be a collapsed lung, and then pnuemonia. This seems to be turning itself around, so let’s keep our fingers crossed there.

In perhaps the most stunning turn of events, Jamie opened her eyes this past weekend. This was something she had not done in nearly a week. It tells us that she’s fighting her sedatives, and that she’s in there. Even though it might not seem like much, it was a huge relief for everyone to see. There have been moments, in the dark hours, where we feared we would never see those eyes open again.

So where does that leave us? To be indelicate, we have no fucking clue. How long the right-heart pump wil do the job is between Jamie and God. But it is undeniable that at some point, she will need a transplant. Whether that is next week or next year, no one knows.

I thank you, my family continues to thank you, for thinking of Jamie. She’s a very lucky little girl to have folks everywhere wishing for her wellness.