New Hope

Today Jim took Ammon to PCMC to meet with Dr. Smith, the ENT that performed the tracheostomy. The doctor did another endoscopy to look at the vocal cords and found that the one that works is working well. There is a little piece of tissue at the bottom but everything else looked good. They discovered that he could breathe well and talk just fine by blocking the tracheostomy today and so it was decided that on May 8th they will perform another surgery to remove that one small piece of tissue and take a closer look at the cords. If all is well, they will remove the trach tube and he will be able to breathe on his own normally.
That means no more ventilator. He will have to always be on a bi-pap, but that's really do-able. He can go somewhere overnight with that. We are trying hard not to be too excited because there is still a possibility it won't work and there's a possibility the sleep doctor will try to keep the trach in place just so we can have Ammon on a ventilator. I think we can win that battle.
At any rate, there is new hope in our household tonight and Ammon nearly jumped out of his wheelchair when he realized he might not have to be hooked up to the ventilator in the future.