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.