The boy knows what he wants

We're in the new room (next door to the old room, it turns out). Shane has been pretty lucid the past couple hours—and especially the past 20 minutes.

Most of the time he's just frustrated that he can't run his mouth a million miles a minute, but that doesn't prevent him from trying. Watching his little pink lips navigate around the tubes in an effort to voicelessly make his requests known is both heartbreaking and endearing. The best, however, is when we actually succeed in understanding him—but sometimes it's not his fault when we don't understand, it's ours.

To wit:

Shane made clear that he wanted to hold his balloon strings, so we gave them to him...but that wasn't good enough. He mouthed a two-syllable phrase that we immediately deciphered as "five balloons." Shane just so happens to have five balloons attached to his bed—so we complied and gave him all the balloons which pleased him greatly. We then shot a hot blast of breath onto our fingernails, rubbed them on our shirts and gave them one last look with a satisfied and smarmy "we rock" smirk on our faces.

A minute or so later Shaney lifted his IV-laiden and strap-restrained left hand to extend his pointer finger to indicate his next request. Eagerly we went through every stuffed animal, every book, every crayon-colored drawing in sight, each met with a stern "no" head-shaking and additional tears from Shane's puffy eyes. Finally, in one last attempt to get his stupid parents to open their eyes, Shane raised his hand as high as he could and mouthed "vee..."

We looked at eachother in confusion and then slowly looked up at the large TV that must have been torturing Shane with a blank screen all day. We said "OH! TV?!" and he nodded as confidently as he could. We turned on Bee Movie just as he launched into a coughing fit requiring tube suction and received another does of chloral hydrate.

Goodnight, Shaney.

We love you more than you'll ever know.