Thursday, January 01, 2009

Day 7 in the NICU

Noah made more small improvements today. They were able to lower his ventilator settings a bit and maintain good vital stats. His x-rays showed that his lungs are healing. They still have a way to go, but they are getting better (as far as we can tell). One thing that was really exciting for us was that they were able to take him partially off his paralytic medication, so he was slightly moving his arms, legs, head, tongue, and tummy. This is the first time we have seen our son move since about 11am on December 26th.

For the past 24 hours, Noah has maintained a decent blood gas level- which is the statistic the doctors are always most concerned about. They want him to maintain a score between 80 and 90. You can score much higher than that, but with his condition they feel that is an acceptable level. His last gas level was an 86, which was good news since they weened him a bit off the ventilator.

We are very grateful for two good days in a row. We are praying for another good day tomorrow. One of the things that we find difficult, among the many on this journey, is leaving our son at night to eat dinner and sleep. We can call the NICU at any time to ask how he is doing, but at some point we have to go to bed and believe that he is still ok and being well taken care of. We have been very blessed to have such caring nurses, so that calms us down a bit, but we miss our Noah when we are away from him.

Our prayer requests for tonight are much of the same as yesterday: Pray that Noah would stay stable or progress, but not regress. Pray that God would guide the doctors' choices and would give them wisdom. Pray that God would give us the ability to accept whatever He has for us tomorrow.

We love our boy.

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