{"id":4804,"date":"2025-12-20T08:55:52","date_gmt":"2025-12-20T11:55:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hopeforgabriel.com\/20-12-2025\/"},"modified":"2025-12-20T09:10:58","modified_gmt":"2025-12-20T12:10:58","slug":"20-12-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hopeforgabriel.com\/en\/20-12-2025\/","title":{"rendered":"20\/12\/2025"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Hello, son,<\/p>\n\n<p>Yesterday started with quite a bit of stress.<br\/>Your breathing was fast.<br\/>Your tube was blocked.<\/p>\n\n<p>Then, without any specific intervention, your breathing returned to something more normal for you.<br\/>It&#8217;s been three days since you&#8217;ve had afternoon respiratory physiotherapy. <br\/>The physiotherapist is currently facing personal difficulties. We wondered about the possible impact of this interruption. <\/p>\n\n<p>Around 8:30 AM, I had to go pledge allegiance to the Brazilian flag to finalize obtaining my Brazilian nationality.<br\/>Military stuff isn&#8217;t really Dad&#8217;s thing.<br\/>But it&#8217;s interesting to observe. Everything is organized, framed, structured. <br\/>And it&#8217;s always interesting to learn about the culture of the country you live in.<\/p>\n\n<p>On the Brazilian flag, it says &#8220;Ordem e Progresso&#8221;.<br\/>Order and Progress in French.<br\/>And that reminded me how much a slogan, whether for a country or a company, isn&#8217;t always representative of reality.<br\/>Our experience in this hospital this year made us feel that these two words were absent from our daily reality.<\/p>\n\n<p>But thinking about it, it&#8217;s the same everywhere.<br\/>When I think of France and its motto &#8220;Libert\u00e9, \u00c9galit\u00e9, Fraternit\u00e9&#8221;, I&#8217;m not sure these values are truly embodied today.<\/p>\n\n<p>Why am I telling you all this, son.<br\/>Because later, you&#8217;ll need to have clear, strong values that you&#8217;ll proudly uphold.<br\/>Values and goals that you&#8217;ll follow like a North Star.<br\/>Without values and without a goal, you&#8217;ll go nowhere.<br\/>Or worse, you&#8217;ll go where others want you to go.<br\/>Freedom is a choice.<\/p>\n\n<p>\n          <strong>Let&#8217;s get back to our day.<\/strong>\n        <\/p>\n\n<p>When I got home, your tube was still blocked.<br\/>Following specialists&#8217; advice, we tried everything.<br\/>Plain water.<br\/>Sparkling water.<br\/>The tube&#8217;s guide wire.<br\/>They even suggested Coca-Cola. But we avoided that. <br\/>In the end, the pediatrician told us that the tube was too old anyway.<\/p>\n\n<p>So we talked with all the specialists.<br\/>And thank them for the time they dedicate to us.<br\/>And we made an important decision.<br\/>To remove the tube without putting in a new one.<\/p>\n\n<p>You know how to eat with a spoon and you like it!<br\/>The real problem is liquids and medications.<br\/>Water makes you cough, and we must avoid any risk of bronchoaspiration.<br\/>The speech therapists help us enormously with this.<br\/>And if we don&#8217;t succeed (which won&#8217;t happen), we might have to go back to the tube.<br\/>But we&#8217;re going to do everything to avoid it.<\/p>\n\n<p>We called a trusted person to help us remove it.<br\/>And on December 19 at 5:19 PM, we removed your gastric tube!<br\/>You had been wearing a tube since April 29.<br\/>That&#8217;s approximately 234 days with a tube out of 257 days of life.<br\/>About 91% of your life with a tube!<\/p>\n\n<p>Son, a new life is therefore beginning for you.<br\/>And I deeply believe it.<br\/>Everything will get better.<br\/>The next step will be oxygen!<\/p>\n\n<p>Once the tube and dressings were removed, we saw that your skin was quite burned on the right side.<br\/>We&#8217;re going to take care of you so you can get back beautiful baby skin!<\/p>\n\n<p>We also changed your oxygen catheter.<br\/>And we even indulged in the luxury of taking it off for a moment.<br\/>Just to see you without anything!<\/p>\n\n<p>That hadn&#8217;t happened in seven months.<br\/>Without a tube.<br\/>Without tubes.<br\/>What joy!<\/p>\n\n<p>It&#8217;s strange, because you look different without all this equipment.<br\/>You no longer have a baby face, but a little boy&#8217;s face.<br\/>You are so beautiful!<br\/>Your mom and I are so proud of you!<br\/>You are so strong!<br\/>Keep it up.<\/p>\n\n<p>We love you<\/p>\n\n<p>Dad<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hello, son, Yesterday started with quite a bit of stress.Your breathing was fast.Your tube was blocked. Then, without any specific intervention, your breathing returned to something more normal for you.It&#8217;s been three days since you&#8217;ve had afternoon respiratory physiotherapy. The physiotherapist is currently facing personal difficulties. We wondered about the possible impact of this interruption. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","iawp_total_views":5,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4804","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-memoirs-of-a-heros-dad"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hopeforgabriel.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4804","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hopeforgabriel.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hopeforgabriel.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hopeforgabriel.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hopeforgabriel.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4804"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/hopeforgabriel.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4804\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4825,"href":"https:\/\/hopeforgabriel.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4804\/revisions\/4825"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hopeforgabriel.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4804"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hopeforgabriel.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4804"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hopeforgabriel.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4804"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}