Friday, August 7, 2009

Still on ECMO

I wanted to give you all an update on Baby Jackson. Jackson has been on ECMO for 9 days now and unfortunately hasn't made a lot of progress. He has had at least one circuit change and didn't do to well. He is stable right now, but surgery isn't on the immediate horizon as it was a couple of days ago. His face is swollen, but the rest of his body isn't as swollen as much as it could be from ECMO.

The hypertension is still pretty severe right now and it doesn't look like he will be coming off ECMO in the immediate future. Our hearts are breaking for this family as we understand that they are going to give Jackson the weekend to make progress and then assess Monday what, if anything, can be done further to help him make progress. They have done about everything possible up to this point to get him over this hurdle, but the hypertension is persistent and not showing signs of decreasing. As Candice told Stef today, they are going to try two more types of medicine on him and give him through the weekend, and will assess from there.

We know that there is still hope as many baby's have been on ECMO much longer than 9 days and survived. As you can imagine, Candice and Rob are devastated though with the progress right now. We are praying that Jackson can make some positive progress over the weekend and hope you will join us in prayer for Jackson and for the family.

I will update as soon as we have more information.

Shawn