Baby Jack's Blog: April 2008

April 30

Jack turned a month old on Monday! He has been doing really good the past few days. He has been losing weight little by little each day. The doctors today said we may be able to bring him home in 2 months! We are excited about his progress. We have posted some pictures from today and yesterday.

April 27

Here are some pictures from today and yesterday. Jack had a tough day today. He had a chest tube put in to drain some of the fluid that was stuck in his chest. Jack is taking longer than expected to recover from the surgery a couple weeks ago. We are still waiting for his swelling to go down. Once the swelling goes down we hope to get him off his ventilator so we can hold him.

April 23

Jack has been very sick since he was closed about 10 days ago. At this point we are waiting for his swelling to go down. He has been gaining weight ever since his surgery. At midnight tonight they weighed him and he finally lost 5 ounces! He is currently 8 pounds 2 ounces and his target weight is 6 pounds 2 ounces. We wish we could give you more on his status, but right now everything with Jack is going to take time and we are in a waiting game.

April 15 Todays Pics

April 14 Surgery

Today the surgeons attempted to get everything back in and close him up. They were able to get everything back in but his skin wouldn't stretch enough, so they left him open and we will wait for the skin to stretch and close him as soon as possible. The surgeon said Jack is doing better than he expected, but he said everything is going to take lots of time. He said that he will leave Jack alone for the next 2-3 weeks before looking into trying to feed him. He wants to see how everything reacts now that its inside. He still thinks Jack will be in the NICU at primary childrens for a few more months. We will keep posting pictures over the next few weeks, but things will be the same for awhile it sounds like. The first two pictures above were after Jacks surgery(They are keeping him completely drugged for the next 48-72 hours so he doesn't wiggle and harm himself). The other pictures were taken right before he went into surgery. He's definately a little PIMP!!!

April 9 Day 9

Jack has been pretty sleepy the last few days. Anytime he starts to get fussy his nurse gives him more pain medicine. They don't want him to feel any pain. The surgeons plan on having everything put back inside by monday and he is scheduled to have surgery on monday to get his stomach sealed. Once he is sealed we have to see if his intestines will start working properly. The surgeons believe there is a blockage somewhere in them and they think that Jack will need several surgery's to fix everything. We hope they are wrong and once everything is inside we hope that everything will just start working the way it's supposed to. At this point we just have to wait and see how his intestines are doing once he gets sealed on monday. Then we will go from there.

Day 7 April 7

Jack had a really good day today. He was had a large amount reduced(being reduced is when they put his intestines back in). He is way ahead of schedule and we are excited about the progress he has made. Originally they thought it would take 3-4 weeks to get everything back in, but today they said he might be done by this Thursday or Friday! Once everything is back in we have get everything working properly before he can come home. This usually takes a minimum of 1-2 months is what we've been told.

Day 6- April 5, 2008 Pictures

Jack loves his binky!

Day 6- April 5, 2008

Tonight Jack was really alert and looking around and moving his arms and legs a lot. He also was really loving his binky. He was actually holding his binky and it was so cute. He just seemed so good and healthy. We were really excited that he was doing so well. Also, the nurses had some music playing in his bed and he loved that. The doctors have worked on putting some of his intestines back in his abdomen twice and it seems to have gone as well as can be expected.

posted by Cathy