Daily Status UpDade - Tuesday, 8/19/14

Today I am thrilled to report that Dr. Anderson thinks the bleeding I talked about in yesterday's post has stopped!  It never ceases to amaze me how these people can tweak this, add that, measure this, and order something else to solve these problems.  I thank God each day for every one of them! 

We had a tense morning and ended up at Children's much earlier than normal.  To gauge whether or not Little D was bleeding internally over night, the nurses were measuring the diameter of his abdomen. When we left last night, it hadn't increased.  However, Tara called in the night after an intense thunder storm woke us, and we found out that he had swollen by 2 cm.  We were worried by that because the best way to stop any internal bleeding according to Dr. Anderson would be to take Dade off of ECMO, ready or not, to remove all of the blood thinning drugs he has to have while on it.  Since he's not quite ready, you can imagine our distress in facing that catch-22 - leave him on ECMO and let him bleed, or take him off early to stop the bleeding.  We fortunately didn't have to worry about that, though.  The true cause of the swelling appears to be something much, much more innocuous, thank God - constipation.  Dade has been slowly but surely getting more and more milk as he shows tolerance for the current dose, but it never dawned on us (or me at least) that it had been a couple of days since Dade had had a dirty diaper... That'll do it.  The little guy has burned through at least 4 diapers today, and his abdomen has returned to normal!!  My youngest sister once told me that we'd talk about poop a LOT as parents of a newborn, but I never thought I'd be elated to have that conversation!

Now about that ECMO. What I said yesterday still stands: we need to get off of ECMO, and to do that, Dade has to maintain his carbon dioxide levels at an acceptable point.  Please don't stop praying for Dade to be able to do just that!  The ECMO circuit is again showing signs of giving out (it's now 8 days old), so they're trying Dade out today to see how he holds those CO2 levels on his own.  His trial began about 10 this morning, and so far so good.  Please, please pray that he can keep it up! Depending on how he holds those levels by himself, my guess (and therefore subject to change) is that we'll either get a new circuit if he can't, or we'll likely come on off ECMO if he can.  We covet your continued prayers over the next 24 hours.  We're going to learn a lot about what Dade can do!

We love you all!