Never Bored

We got home from the hospital with Matthew on the 15th of December. We had a lot of problems with the billing department of the hospital. We were supposed to leave at noon and didn't get out until after 6:00 pm. They had our bill ready and they were supposed to direct bill our insurance, but when they finally got the authorization (they didn't send in the information like they said they were going to do) they added over $6,000 to our bill for the insurance. We can't fault the care, but there were some exorbitant charges on the bill. One being $28.00 for a 4 oz bottle. Needless to say we tried to fight that one, but they told us that this is the international price for the bottle (which I didn't want or need). We paid it, but not happily.

Thankfully we have had no problems with Matthew since he has been home. Everyone else has been sick, but Matthew is healthy.

Yesterday we had to take Joey in for his surgery to have the pin removed from his arm. We got in the truck and were ready to go, but the truck wouldn't start. We had to reshuffle things a bit, but finally fit all 8 of us in the little truck. Due to some very fast driving on Jason's part we made it to the hospital just on time. Joey's surgery went fine. He had a slightly rocky recovery time, but nothing nearly as bad as his first surgery. We had to sit in the recovery room for almost an hour because the billing office had not gotten the acceptance letter from our insurance company in the states. Thankfully we were able to contact Aetna and they let her know what email account they sent the letter to and then we were able to go home. Joey was bored sitting with me in the recovery room, but somehow we made it through.

When we got home we found out that we had another problem. When we left the house in the morning we had very low electrical power. Unfortunately that meant no shower for me. We thought that when we got home the problem would be fixed. It wasn't. After a lot of searching and testing we found out that one of the electrical wires had broken from the wind and was causing the power spikes and shortages. This morning we called our friend Alan Jackson and he was able to help Jason fix the problem. Thankfully we had everything on surge protectors and so nothing was fried in the process.

We are hoping that this new year will have a lot less adventures for us. :-)

Matthew update 12-15-2008

Today is the day that we bring Matthew home. We are at this time waiting in a coffee shop for the billing department to call us. They have to write up and revise our bill and then we can pay it and take Matthew home.

He is growing and doing good. The doctors were slightly concerned about the size of the soft spot on his head earlier last week. He has a Tate head (small) and not the Smith one (huge) like my other kids. Thankfully, his head has grown since birth and the plate in the back moved to enlarge the soft spot. This would not have kept him in the hospital, but would have been something we had to keep an eye on.

Yesterday I wrote a blog, but could not connect to the internet. I will try to post that when we get home tonight.

Thank you everyone for your prayers. Please continue to pray for little Matthew, for his health, as if he gets sick again (this is cold and flu season in Honduras) he will probably be put back in the hospital.

Matthew update 12-12-2008

Matthew has now enjoyed a full day without oxygen and all his levels have stayed good. He is currently eating just over an ounce when fed by a bottle. We are spending all day at the hospital and I am able to nurse him every three hours. We are praising the Lord for the improvements he has made.

At this time there is really no new news to report. He is still in the intensive care, but only under observation. He cannot be in the regular nursery as they don’t want him to be exposed to any bacteria at this time as his antibiotic has killed not only the bad bacteria, but good bacteria as well. The doctor still wants him to stay in the hospital until he finishes his antibiotics and this happens Sunday night. Doctor Dala told us that he will release Matthew to us Monday at noon.
Monday we are going to have a field trip to the hospital to pick up Matthew. We are all excited to be able to bring him home.

Yesterday Joey told me that he will let Matthew see his doctor when he gets sick since his doctor sees babies and big kids too.

On a funny note, on the Thursday that Matthew was born, the doctor was trying to explain something to Jason about preemie care. He took out a manual in English to show Jason, but instead of letting him read it, Dr. Dala translated it into Spanish for Jason. The doctor looked so stressed that Jason didn’t point out to him that he could read English.

Matthew update 12-11-2008

Today we came in to see Matthew and he was dressed and out from under the oxygen. He had a good night so they decided to take him off of the oxygen several hours before. He was supposed to be on a feeding tube until this afternoon, but he decided he was done with that and pulled it out last night. Rather than try to put it back in, they decided to see if he would take a bottle. He took it like a pro and so they left the feeding tube out.

When we got in he had just had a bath and was taking his nebulization treatment. He was content and sleepy. It was his time to eat however. The doctor wanted to see if he would nurse. We tried and tried, but he didn't want to wake up. Since he had eaten a lot as his last feeding we decided to make him wait a few hours so he would be really hungry.

We left for lunch and came back at 1:00. He was awake and finally nursed. He was so content to be held and to nurse that he got really mad when we put him back in his bed. As much as I would like to hold him all day, I know that it would lead to many problems in the future when I can't hold him all day. The nurses don't hold him unless it is needed. This was the first time he had been really held since birth and we both really enjoyed it.

It is very calming to hold your baby for the first time. Especially when he has been in the NICU for a week.

Matthew update

Matthew continues to get better. Doctor Dala called us last night about 10:00 pm to tell us that Matthew is demanding more food. The Tate in him had to come out somewhere. He was only supposed to be receiving 15cc every three hours, but they had to raise it to 20cc to get him to stop crying and searching for food.

This morning when we came in we noticed how quite it was in his room. We at first thought that something was wrong. The first thing I did was look at his vital signs monitor and everything was normal. He had a new nurse named Ana and she told us that they had taken him off of the oxygen mixer so that is why it was quieter in the room. Now that he is off the oxygen mixer he is receiving 27% oxygen. A normal person breathes 21% naturally so he is down to only 6% extra right now.

This afternoon they are going to take out his catheter. The put a catheter in his belly button and now that he is getting better they are taking it out and putting in a normal IV. The doctors don’t want us anywhere near when they are doing that as it is basically a small surgery. I don’t mind as I don’t want to be there either.

Because that procedure is scheduled for 12:00, they are going to wait to completely remove the oxygen until tomorrow morning. Tomorrow afternoon they want to start teaching him to suck so he can nurse.

The next step after he starts nursing would be to see if he can regulate his own body temperature. He is under a heater right now. The earliest he would be released is Monday afternoon. The doctor wants to have him completely off medications and at least 24 hours of observation prior to releasing him. It is a blessing to be able to see an end in sight. Please continue to pray that he has no setbacks so that we can take him home on Monday.

This morning we were in the room when they fed him. Just after get got done eating, he had an explosion. He filled his diaper and then proceeded to go to sleep. They were going to change him and I asked if I could change him. The doctor said that it was fine. First though I had to wash and sanitize my hands twice and take off my wedding ring. I thought it was so funny to go through so much cleaning just to change a dirty diaper. I am glad though that the doctor is cautious.

Sorry there are no new pictures at this time. My batteries ran dead when I was taking a video of Matthew getting fed. I have to get more batteries before I can post any pictures.

Eyes and Cries

Last night after I wrote my blog we went back into the NICU to see Matthew again. He was sleeping as normal. He had gotten really hungry and so was trying to put his mouth on the opening of the oxygen hood that he has. The nurse had just called for the portable x-ray machine to be brought in so they could take another x-ray and see how he was doing. We were still standing in the small room that he has and they brought in the machine and cut off our exit. We asked the nurse if we could stay in the adjoining room and watch through the window. She said that would be fine and they started working at getting him into position to take the x-ray. When she picked him up, he opened his eyes. We had never seen his eyes so we were so excited. I told the nurse that we were so glad to know that he really does have eyes.

This morning when we came in he was contentedly sleeping on his stomach so the jaundice light could start to "tan" his back. We had only been in a few minutes and they asked us to leave so they could take some more blood for tests. Here they don't let the parents stay in the room if they are doing anything, even changing a diaper. I left and went into a room across the hall to wait. I heard a baby crying quite loudly. As we haven't heard Matthew cry yet, I had to go and see if it was him. It was and he was loudly proclaiming that he was not happy. It was such a relief to hear a good strong cry. It just showed us that his lungs were indeed working well. After I saw that it was Matthew crying I went back into the room I was in and just listened to him.

The doctor came in not much later and let us know that he is doing good. He is eating up to 10cc of breast milk at this time. They are going to upgrade him to 15cc at 1:00 this afternoon. He has to get to 31cc before they will start to cut back on the oxygen. His blood pressure was slightly high today so they are also cutting back on the vitamins he is taking as he is finally getting nutrition from the milk.

Thank you for your prayers and please don't stop praying. He is doing so much better, but is not out of the woods yet.

Matthew Elian Tate was born on the 4th of December, 2008 at 8:58 am. He was born by c-section at the Honduras Medical Center. He weighed 6lbs 14oz and was measured at 20 ½ inches long. Right after delivery he had a very weak cry and it was discovered that he had fluid in his lungs. Since Joey had this same thing we weren’t very concerned. But before I go too far into this story let me share what led up to this point.

Two weeks before Matthew was born, I had a doctor’s appointment for a routine checkup. Everything was good except for the fact that the baby’s heart rate was on the low side. It was still normal, but my doctor decided that she would take the baby at 37 weeks of gestation because of this. At that same visit she gave me some antibiotics to help be get rid of a bacterial infection that I had. I was also given Miolene, which is a medication used to stop labor. In the next week I had to take the Miolene a few times, but it was nothing like the month and a half of it I had to use when pregnant with Joey. We found out just a few days ago that a complication of Miolene is water in the lungs.

Matthew’s birth went well. I had a c-section and my tubes tied at the same time. They showed Matthew to me, but as they were cleaning him up I noticed that he wasn’t crying as he should. My first thoughts were that he sounded like Joey did when he was born and that something wasn’t quite right. They took Matthew and brought him down to the pediatric floor. Jason was with him when they measured him and took all of his vital signs. They did an x-ray and found that there indeed was fluid in his lungs. They thought that this was caused by the medication I was taking. After a few hours he was not getting any better, but worse. The doctor did some blood tests and found out that his white blood cell count was extremely high. Even before they got those results the doctor put him on an antibiotic just in case it turned out that he had a bacterial infection.

The doctor let us know, after he got the results from the blood tests back, that they were taking preventative measures to keep him from going into septic shock. He was given plasma, medicine to raise his blood pressure, medicine to raise his heart rate, and two antibiotics. A few hours later just as I was given medicine to make me sleep through the night, he came in and told us that because his fingers were starting to turn blue, he was going to put Matthew on the respirator. It is a good thing that I had just taken medicine to make me sleep or I wouldn’t have been able to sleep at all that night.

The next morning when Jason went to see Matthew the doctor told him that it was a good thing that my OB/GYN had taken him when she did. He said that if we had kept him in the womb a week more he would probably not have made it. He may have even been still-born.

We were all praying for God to do a miracle and heal him quickly. The antibiotics that Matthew is taking can take up to 72 hours to show they are working. If he got to 72 hours on them and wasn’t any better than the doctor was going to change for stronger antibiotics. At 11:00 am on Friday, the blood results from that morning were back and there was a drastic reduction of white blood cells and many of the chemical levels in his blood were close to normal. I have never seen the doctor with a bigger smile on his face. We had no idea what the test results meant, but by the look on the doctor’s face we could see that it was a good thing.

Saturday night and Sunday they worked at slowly lowering his oxygen intake through the respirator and his medications. Sunday they had to give him a single dose of some medicine that would make him more alert. He was real good about not fighting the respirator in the beginning, but he had gotten lazy and was letting the respirator breathe for him. With this medicine, he started to fight and the doctors started lowering the number of breaths per minute that the machine took for him.

I was released Sunday night and before I went home we came in to see him one last time for the night and the doctor had lowered his breaths per minute to 22. This is all the way down from 55. When we were in there they fed him for the first time in his life. He has a feeding tube in and they fed him 10cc of milk that I gave them.

This morning when we came in he was breathing only 8 breaths a minutes from the machine. The rest he was doing by himself.

At 12:50 today they took him off the respirator. YEAH!!!! He is still under an oxygen hood and has a feeding tube in his mouth, but he is doing better. He is completely off the heart medications and respirator. He is on a fast until 7:00 tonight. The doctors want to make sure that he has an empty stomach just in case they have to put him on the respirator again.

Please continue to pray with us that he will keep making steps in the right direction. He will be on antibiotics until Sunday, but we would like to bring him home or at least see him out of NICU before then.

Joey's Arm

Friday right when we had gotten home from a full day of shopping for a crib mattress we heard Joey start to cry. He was in the back yard and had fallen down the steps that lean into the pool. We have a built-in pool in the house we are renting. It is very deep and they want to charge us more if we use it so we have it dry. The kids play in there all the time. We use it to store all of our outside toys. It has three steps going down into it and some how he missed a step and fell.

He was crying a lot and was holding his arm. He was hurting, but could move his arm so I thought it would be best to wait a few hours to see if it would get better. We put up the Christmas tree and still he was favoring it. I wanted to take him in, but Jason decided to wait until Saturday as he could still move his arm.

He could lift up his arm and move it, but twisting it back and forth brought on grimaces of pain. After decorating the church for Christmas on Saturday morning, we took him into the ER to have his arm checked out. When the doctor came into see us he showed us the clear break in the radial bone in his left arm (of course he is left handed). I thought it was funny that his bone was not straight, but in an arc shape. I was about to say something to the doctor when he asked us if we saw that the bone was not straight. He told us that because of this, he would have to put a metal rod in his arm that would stay for a month.

He was prepared to do this right away, but I had just given Joey a small candy bar (we hadn’t had lunch and were starving). He had to fast in order for them to do the surgery. The doctor put on a temporary cast and we went home for the night.

Sunday morning we had to be with him in the hospital at 8:30 am. I explained to him as much as I could. He knew he was going to get sleepy medicine and when he woke up, his arm would be in a “pretty” cast. He woke up this morning so excited to go to the hospital. He wanted to get the sleeping medicine. He did have a slight problem with the booties he was required to wear. He didn’t want them on and he also didn’t really want to take his underwear off so they said that they would do that when he went to sleep.

He wasn’t too excited when they took him from us, but he went willingly howbeit with a frown on his face.

He came out of surgery about an hour and a half later. He was acting as Joey normally acts when tired. He was cranky. He was mad at the world and wouldn’t even shake the nurse’s hands. After about a half an hour of crying, the nurse came out with a huge syringe of pain medication for him. As soon as he saw that needle he tried to hide his hand and started crying much more strongly. We tried to tell him that it would not hurt as they were going to put it into the IV that he still had in. We had to physically hold his hand out so the nurse could get access to him. Once she had put in about half of the syringe he stopped crying and had this look on his face that was so surprised that it indeed didn’t hurt.

By the time we left the hospital he was his happy self again. He finally did shake the nurse’s and doctor’s hand. He is adjusting well to life with a cast. If he can get through this month without breaking the cast open it will be a miracle. He is running all over the place. His only complaint is about the itching. He thinks a mosquito got into his cast and bit him.

Happenings

Lots has happened in the past week. I will try to update you later this afternoon if I can find a wireless internet hotspot.