Easter 2011

What a wonderful day spending time together as a family and celebrating the Risen Savior!

Home Again!

We are home from the hospital, and so happy! Jacob is eating well, and giving us some dirty diapers too...so we feel confident that we will not have to go back! YAY!!!!!

The last time I posted, Jacob was just starting a liquid diet. He did well for a day on that, then we went easily into some bland foods on Wednesday. We continued to get dirty diapers, which was a really good sign that things were moving around in there! So, on Thursday morning, they said that we can go home as long as Jacob gives them another dirty diaper after eating solid foods the day before. So he performed that task and off we went!

Thanks for the prayers for our little guy!

Jacob's Day in Pictures

Today we made some progress and had some fun while doing it! We got a visit from Uncle Biggie, met some Vanderbilt football players, and had soup, jello, and juice. We are still waiting for some dirty diapers, but they've got to be coming soon!

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No more NG!

Here's a picture of Jacob this morning with the NG, and another from this afternoon without it. Yay! We still can't have liquid diet yet, just sips of water and ice chips. Maybe tomorrow... For now, we will just hang out and wait for some poop. Come on Jacob, get things moving!

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A slight setback...

So...we are back at Vanderbilt Children's Hospital. Boo! This was definitely not the plan! After we came home, Jacob was doing great. He was eating well and had a good diaper (if you know what I mean)...so we thought we were on the right track. However, on Friday afternoon Jacob started grabbing at his tummy again. We watched it for a few hours and then at dinner time we noticed that he didn't want to eat. We let him go to bed, but he would cry and pull at his tummy. We noticed that his tummy kept getting bigger and was pretty hard...just like last time. :-(

So we tried "helping" his bowels move along, and that didn't seem to help his belly get any relief. So, at about 4 in the morning we packed our stuff and headed back to the hospital. The ER doctor came in and said "Are you as tired as you are entitled to be?" We obviously responded yes.

After a few hours, we saw the surgeons and they believe that Jacob has postoperative ileus. Basically, his bowels did not wake up completely in his belly, and the food he was eating was.not going through. They put another NG tube down into his stomach and drained it, relieving much of the pressure, and said we just have to "wait until they wake up completely."

Needless to say, we are tired and frustrated, but not defeated! Jacob will come around, just in his own time! Prayers for his bowels to wake up would be GREAT!!!!!!!!

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Yay!

We are home from the hospital!

Bummer!

The last time I posted Jacob was pretty sick. Well...it didn't get better so we went back to the doctor last Wednesday. They said his virus gave him an ear infection and put us on antibiotics. The next day Jacob began pulling at his tummy, became very restless, didn't want to be touched, wanted to stay in bed, and was overall very upset. We watched him closely and noticed that his tummy was getting bigger and bigger. We didn't know if this was an allergic reaction to the medicine, just constipation, or even something more serious. We went back to the doctor on Friday morning because Jacob's abdomen was very distended and he was not drinking or eating and lethargic. We were sent to the ER at Vanderbilt where they did x-rays and found a bowel obstruction in his small intestines. He was taken back for surgery that night and they found a section that was kinked off and purple in color, they had to cut out about 10 cm and sew it back together. They also found other adhesions on his intestines and took care of those while he was opened up. The surgery took 3 hours. Recovery was very rough the first two days. Basically, Jacob had a bad reaction to the morphine and sometimes it took three of us to hold him down and try to calm him. Finally the doctors listened to us about what was best for Jacob, and gave him Dilaudid for pain. What a difference that made for Jacob! Within a few hours he was calm, sleeping, even interacting with us during his awake time. There's about three stages to his recovery...we are in the final stages now. Jacob had to have a bowel movement or pass gas, and have limited amounts coming out of an NG tube, before we could give him any liquids. When he tolerates liquids, then we can move to solid food and if he tolerates that, we can go home. We are on a liquid diet now, and hopefully will start food tomorrow or Friday, then be able to go home either Saturday or Sunday. While we did not want this to happen, we feel like God has been with us. We feel like He orchestrated the timing so well for all this to happen when it did. Dr. Morrow, the surgeon that performed all of Jacobs surgeries, "just happened" to be on call that night and God knew that would give us such peace of mind knowing that he would be doing the surgery. We learned alot about being advocates for Jacob and we believe that things will only get better from here! Here's some pictures of Jacob from the past few days. Deon never left his side through the whole process. They even took Deon into the operating room. However, I sure hope Deon's germy body wasn't anywhere near Jacob's insides...They probably left him in a holding area and just told Jacob that he was with him always!

This is a picture of Jacob today drinking his juice and waving to the camera. So sweet!

Taking a wagon ride around the hospital.

There's an outside area where Jacob got to see statues, fountains, fish, and just enjoy a little sunshine.

We'll update when we are home!

SICK

Jacob must have caught a virus, a nasty one at that, because since Friday morning this boy has not wanted to do anything but sleep in bed or lay on the couch watching Mickey, Umi, and Super Why. Deon is always at his side, as is Mommy and Daddy. He started coughing on Tuesday night, but we didn't think it was anything to be concerned about...especially since he's had colds before that are minor...then Thursday night we were up all night with him, and Friday we took him to the doctor. He was breathing fast (about 50-60 breaths a minute) and just had a lack of energy. The doctor had us get a chest XRay, which came back normal (no pneumonia, yay!), and said we should watch him closely. Saturday his fever spiked to 103.1 and slowly came down with the help of ibuprofin. He still has a slight fever and if it doesn't get better by Wednesday we'll go back to the doctor for some more help. Any prayers you can send up on his behalf would be GREAT! :) Here's some pictures of what our guy has been doing lately... ...and doing even more of this...

Bless his Heart!