We're back to the point where no news is good news. Andrew has continued to be stable and calm. He's still on both the paralytic and the sedative, so he hasn't been awake for a while. When we arrived at the hospital today, the unit was closed for a procedure on another baby. A half-hour event turned into an hour and a half, and by the time we got in we had about twenty-five minutes before we got kicked out for shift change. Fortunately, he's pretty boring when he's passed out.
Tomorrow they're going to start doing tests to figure out exactly what's going on with his recent difficulties. First they'll give him a CT scan to get a better picture of his lungs, heart, and other internal organs. Then they'll do something called a V-Q scan in order to determine which portions of his lungs are well-ventilated, and which have good blood flow....hopefully his lungs will have both. After a few days, they'll do a bronchoscopy to see if there's anything wrong with his airway...a small camera will be threaded down his windpipe and look for collapses, or what they call a "floppy airway."
Aside from the planned tests, we don't know a whole lot. More as things develop.
About Me
- JR
- D's husband. Andrew's dad. Son, friend, cousin, nephew, grandson....the list goes on.
About This Blog
This blog was originally created to disseminate information about Andrew, our son who was born on June 15, 2007. Andrew was born with a congenital diaphragmatic hernia (CDH) that allowed abdominal organs (stomach, intestines, etc) to migrate into his chest cavity during development. This prohibited normal lung growth, making it difficult for him to live without significant life support, including a ventilator, a lung bypass machine called ECMO, and a long list of medications.
Andrew spent the next five months at Rady Children's Hospital in San Diego, undergoing multiple operations for the hernia repair, intestinal rearrangement, stomach tube insertion, etc. Multiple attempts to help him breathe on his own without a ventilator were unsuccessful due to a number of anatomical and developmental difficulties. Andrew's failure to progress and an abundance of overwhelmingly unfavorable test results led us to remove him from life support and let nature take its course on November 19, 2007.
We greatly appreciate the time we were able to spend with Andrew, and this blog continues as a source for information, a tribute to his memory, and a continuation of our lives without him present. From the emotional to the mundane, our lives have been forever changed by his presence; those lives are now chronicled here.
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