Day Two!

Well, we had another good day today with Mr. Max. He is showing all signs that everything is going in the right direction. The thing that we need to remind ourselves is that a lot of these CDH babies have what the nurses and doctors call a "honeymoon" phase. They start off doing really well, but then can crash later on.

We are just praying that this will not be the case for our little man as the days continue to roll on by. I am back in the Ronald McDonald House tonight and miss my wife and son.

Today started off with Claire telling me that she got a good nights sleep (finally)!!! It seems like every time she starts to get really ready to sleep, another knock on her door, another doctor, another check up, or SOMETHING is waking her up. She is a rockstar though and I couldn't be more proud of her. The nurses told her that she was the easiest patient on the floor and was recovering very quickly. She already has all her IVs and everything out and was up and walking around today. She walked down to the NICU this morning with me to say good morning to max and I was able to get a good shot of the two of them:


Max was fast asleep at the time, and was just hanging out and doing well. I really like to look at all the monitors and numbers and try to figure things out and see how he is doing. I think that is just how my brain works, and I have seen some cool trends. His CO2 levels and oxygen levels are still really low and Dr. Kays lowered his breaths per minute from 34 to 30 and oxygen from 60% to 50%. Obviously we don't want to have a ventilator at all but that is getting down there. Room oxygen is about 21% so we are getting down to that area as well. Max is seriously doing GREAT.

This afternoon I went back into the NICU to visit and it looked like Max had decided to see who had come to visit him!

He had opened one of his little eyes and was looking around the room at everything! This was the first time that I had seen him awake and was blown away! As cool as everything has already been and all the love I have for him already went up like 3804823408563954982923%. Being able to see my little guy moving around and looking at things was HUGE. But then....


I didn't pose this picture. I was sitting there and just talking to him and he looked at me, reached up and grabbed my finger. I really almost lost it. I don't know if it was just reaction or what, but I really felt like he was just letting me know that he was going to be ok and wanted to just pray with me for a bit...so we did.

As far as surgery is looking...Dr. Kays and his team are looking at doing Max's repair surgery on Thursday sometime. He may be able to do a type of surgery that doesn't require him to do the full on incision and just make a few small cuts. This would speed up recovery time (hopefully) and allow us to bring our little dude home!! We couldn't be more excited.

JUDE UPDATE: In some of our last postings you may have read about the friend we have made here that has the CDH baby as well. He was delivered yesterday as well and is in the NICU bay right next to Max. They were able to do the repair surgery on him today, and our friends said that it went better than the doctors could have hoped! They thought that he would only have about 10% of a diaphragm when they went in there but found out that there was about 50% of one! This is dramatically increased his chances of beating this with Max and getting to go home. It also lowered his chances of having to go on ECMO (heart and lung bypass).

That is really all for now. It is about 11pm here and I am going to bed so I can get back to the hospital tomorrow and hang out with Claire and Max. Thanks again for all of your support and notes. It means more than we can say! Night!