Wednesday Esther continued to improve. She is still on the oscillator and we are seeing vibrations to bellow her belly button. Her stats continue to look great. The doctors get most excited about her oxygen and carbon dioxide numbers on the ECMO machine. Having these numbers high means that her body is doing what it is supposed to do.
Since the oscillator allows small puffs of air in, it is not filling the lungs but working the bronchioles and getting down the the areoles. Since a few days ago they were not opening at all we praise God for the progress she is making. Again she still has a long way to go. We are wanting to meet with her surgeons soon to talk about her progress and see if surgery will help her.
Thursday we went up on the wave length of her oscillator. Which allows more air or go into her lungs. She seems to be tolerating it all day, but we still need to figure out where we are going from here.
A few days after Esther was out on ECMO, the doctors decided that she also needed to be on dialysis. Honestly I wish we would have no more about it to challenge the doctors on it. We feel like it is causing more problems than it is helping her. And now she is dependent on dialysis and there is nothing we can do about it. She isn’t peeing because her kidneys aren’t working. They believe this is from the fluid build up around her heart and the lack of blood flow. If her kidneys don’t work she won’t survive. Right now dialysis is running through the ECMO machine. They cannot do dialysis on her without the ECMO until her diaphragm patch heals. Basically her kidneys need to start working again or there is nothing they can do for her.
Dave has been spending a lot of time with Esther. He understands and ask better questions than I do when her doctors come around. He has had some good conversations with the doctors. I feel we understand Esther’s care better and wish we would have known more in the beginning. But as any mom pregnant with a child who has a birth defect, you never know how severe things will be until they are born.
We are starting to see her lungs open up and we pray God will continue to work on that. Also for her kidneys to miraculously start working again.
Also I wanted to let people know even if you don’t have facebook you can still go to her prayer page and see the updates we post. Just go to www.facebook.com/esthermaehannon and you can see everything. (Dave just told me that and I had no idea. I figured other people might not know either)