GREAT NEWS!

We went to meet the neonatoligist Monday 5/18/09. She was awesome! She was so easy to talk to and just wanted to inform us on everything plus more. She will be the main doctor taking care of our little Jackson while he's in the NICU. Her name is doctor Whitbourn. I'm glad that Rob got to be there with me when i met her because most of these appointments he has to miss due to his work, although he has made all the important ones so far.

Dr. Whitbourn came in with our file and was very excited to read our situation. She had no idea that our CDh baby looked so good. Needles to say she was very surprised to see that the baby just had his stomach up in his chest and that my doctor has already seen the left lung developing since he met me at 20 weeks. She said that was just amazing and very very good news for us. She hasn't had a case like this in a long time. She said there are 3 cdh babies to be born there before i give birth in July, and 3 more after i give birth! I was shocked to find that out. I mean this is kind of a rare condition. Anyways out of all these babies she told us that our baby looks the best and is on the mild in of the spectrum, if there is a mild end. I mean as good as everything looks having a CDH baby is still a very serious and life thring defect.

I know i haven't talked about ECMO on my blog yet but it's a lung heart bypass machine that these babies get put on if the ventilator and everything else that the doctors are trying to do isn't enough for the baby. So ECMO is pretty much life support for these babies. I will write more about ECMO here in a bit. One out of three babies that are put on ECMO come off. This means 1 out of 3 don't survive. Not all the cdh babies get bad enough to be put on ECMO but alot do and thats why it's there. Dr. Whitbourn gave us some great news on this as well. She said by reading our babies case that she is almost positive that our baby will not go on ECMO. YAY! Then she said she wasn't God and things could change but everything looks very positive for us as of right now. I took that very well, just because she is the doctor that takes care of these babies and knows what to expect and i doubt she would tell us such good news when she sees everything she does. She also told us she would pray for us and the baby and i thought that was really neat.

So that's all the news i have for now. We just need to pray really hard that the left lung keeps developing and the stomach is the only thing that stays in the chest. My son Ty was praying for the baby last night and i tried to explain what lungs were and what they did and that we needed to pray for Jackson's left lung to keep on growing. This is what is prayer was " dear God please help my baby Jackson to be healthy and let his left lump grow sooooo big". It was really funny! Until next time.......................................

Candice