Whew!! What a wild day this turned out to be! It started with the kickoff to the diaper drive at HEB, rolled through three TV interviews, nearly six hours in the NICU, a few momentous occasions, and is finally coming to a close with this blog post. Casey and I are pretty exhausted (and so is Eliot!) and we’re hoping we can catch up on a lot of busy work and rest this weekend…that’s the plan, anyway. We haven’t had much success sticking to the daily plan lately so I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what tomorrow brings!
So here are the highlights:
– As you see below, HEB kicked off a week long diaper drive for us at the four points store (click the HEB logo for details)…very exciting! The folks at HEB were incredible!!
– I got to hold one of the babies for the first time this morning!! I held Britton for about an hour while Casey held Brooklyn for the first time. It was also the first time that we got to see all of the babies without their beanies and eye shades…their little faces are so perfect! It seemed like the world stood still for a while as we held each baby, slowly rocking them and telling them about the new world they are now a part of…so peaceful!
– The KVUE interview was really neat because we got to hold a couple of the babies (Brooklyn and Britton) up for the cameras and introduce them to Austin! That was the first time that I had really “handled” any of them and believe me, I was nervous! I know just about all men have an irrational fear of holding babies because they are so fragile and we feel like we’re going to break them, but with these little guys, that’s a real concern! They are so frail in your hands it feels like if you sneezed you’d probably break a few ribs!
– When we were taking a break from our first time in the NICU, KEYE called and asked to come up for another interview. We met up with them 30 minutes later, talked with them for about 20 minutes, then ran upstairs for a second round with the babies.
– In the afternoon, I got to hold Lila while Casey held Ryan, again for about an hour. Lila was the second smallest so I held the two pip squeaks of the bunch today.
All in all, the babies continue to do very well, however we still need prayers for Lila’s heart problem. They performed an echo cardiogram on her today to determine what exactly was the cause of her heart murmur. The news wasn’t unexpected, but it wasn’t welcome, either. She has two holes in her heart, one big and one small.
The big one is called a patent ductus arteriosus (PDA) and is relatively common in premies. There is a vessel that is supposed to be open during pregnancy to allow more blood flow to get to the lungs which is supposed to close upon birth. In premies it oftentimes does not close. They started her on medication tonight to get the vessel to close up. If that doesn’t work, she will likely end up being operated on, though the doctors do not expect we will get to that point.
The small hole is between two of the hearts chambers and it is called a ventricular suptal defect (VSD). I think these are also somewhat common in premies, but I’m not certain. This hole can not be treated with medication, but is not a big enough problem yet to require surgery. It will hopefully close on its own or never cause any complications that we should be concerned with, but no one can say for sure what it will do. The doctors will monitor the VSD closely, possibly beyond her stay in the NICU. Both of the holes in her heart, if they become problematic, will cause difficulty breathing and eating and will stunt her growth.
Despite this news about Lila, one of the doctors described the babies’ conditions as being in “various stages of excellent” and we couldn’t agree more!! Thank you to everyone for continuing to lift our babies up in your prayers and please continue to do so!
Pictures of all of the day’s events will be uploaded to the website soon!
God Bless,
Ethan
