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.

Internet again

We finally have Internet again and now that I am sitting down to write this blog, I don't know where to start.

We got safely moved in. It took us about a week of making trips with two intensive days of help to move the big stuff. We love this new house. It is just perfect for us. We have four bedrooms, a classroom, a big kitchen, and a living room/dining room combo. We also have a built in pool, but it is much to deep for the kids and we don't want to pay extra for it so the kids play in it with it being dry.

The negatives with this house is that there in no washer outlet and the electricity is not powerful enough to run the dryer (plus there is no hookup). With the washer we just fill it with a hose. It takes a while, but it gets done. I try to do one load of laundry a day. I do the lights on one day and the darks the next. On really sunny days I also wash the towels. I have limited clothes line so the towels must wait until it is really nice out. Not having a dryer means that I have to iron most everything. It has been a little bit of an adjustment, but if I do one to two loads a day and don't let it pile up on me I can get it done in about 45 minutes. Since my house is smaller it is easier to keep clean so the time I saved is now spent ironing.

Our friends, the Jacksons, rented this house a year ago and put the dryer in the kitchen. They used the same outlet that the stove was on (just unplugged the stove) and dried in there. They also burnt out their dryer from the fluctuating power so I decided the I would dry on the line as long as possible.

During the move we were able to get rid of a lot of things that we don't need anymore. We had several things that were just collecting dust as well as three trunks of baby girl clothes that I won't be needing. We decided to have a garage sale at the church and sell everything to make money for the Sunday school's Christmas Party. We have been wanting to buy all of the faithful kids a gift, but since we are also building a classroom there is no money available. I was praying that God would let us raise 2,000 Lempira (about $105.00). We didn't have much time to advertise it, but when we opened the doors of the church to start the sale there were probably 150 people there. We had a lot of theft (we were expecting it as we had to have the sale in the church and it is a high crime area), but we were still able to raise 4,700 Lempira. We have four bags of clothes left, but everything else sold. Praise the Lord we will now have enough to do what we were planning on doing.

The Monday after the sale we went to my normal doctor's appointment. I was 34 1/2 weeks along. I had been having a lot of contractions, but nothing regular so I wasn't worried. My doctor did my exam and decided to change my c-section date. It was going to be for the 20th, but because of the fact that the contractions were making progress and the baby's heart rate was on the low side, she decided that she was going to take the baby on the 4th of December. This is the day I hit 37 weeks. The baby is big and she is afraid if the baby even lets me get to 38 weeks that the heart rate will drop way down because of the size. I, however, am not worried about that. I am worried about the fact that I live further away from the hospital and if the baby decides to come we have a good drive ahead of us. Until I hit 36 weeks (Thanksgiving Day) I can take the medicine to stop labor (and have had to almost every day this week), but after that I cannot. We have another appointment tomorrow and we will see if she changes anything.

The good thing though is that the baby is measuring big and continues to grow. I, however, haven't gained a lb in a few weeks. My goal is to stay under 200 lbs (a feat I haven't achieved while pregnant yet) and so far I am right on track.

Lately I have not been going anywhere. I cannot drive because of the medicine and threat of having to take the medicine. I am so thankful that we got moved in when we did. Who knows what might have happened if we hadn't gotten in when we did.

We are also thankful that our old landlord kept begging us to get out of the house. By law we had to pay rent up to December 15th. She wouldn't leave us alone though and we found out that it was because she already had another client. We decided to move out quicker and give her back her keys and just not pay her last months rent. She didn't mind so we did this and because of that we were able to get out Internet running. YEAH!!!! Thank the Lord for his goodness.

I am hoping that I can find a little time to put some new pictures on here. Unfortunately there is a lot to do before the baby come and not a lot of time. :-)

Moving

We are moving!!!!! We got a call a week ago Saturday that a house we were interested in San Buenaventura was going to be available. We saw the house on Sunday and gave the deposit and started moving in yesterday. We have done a lot, but still have a long ways to go. It would be so much easier if we had U-haul here.

We will not have Internet for the next month or so. We must pay two rent payments this month or risk losing the house in San Buenaventura. Therefore the money needed to buy the satellite for the Internet will just not be there for another month or so. We will be relying on the free Internet in the restaurants here. Anytime we leave the house we will just have to make sure that we have the laptop with us. We should be able to check our email once a week. So if anyone has an urgent message for us it, sorry it won't be seen for a while.

For those of you praying for Xiomara, thank you so much. She is doing better and will find out on Wednesday if she can go home or not. She needs to get home and out of her mother's care. Unfortunately her mother knows more than the doctor and does not allow Xiomara to take the necessary steps toward improvement. We are praying that she will be able to come home sometime this week.

We are all striving to get moved in before Audrey's slumber party this Friday. She turns 8 on Sunday and is having 5 girls over to celebrate. They are going to Princess Club to get their hair and nails done first.

Thank you for your prayers for us and please keep praying that all of this moving wouldn't put me into labor too early.

Hospital Escuela

Yesterday, Jason and I went to Hospital Escuela to visit Xiomara. She is the lady in our church who gave birth less than a month ago. She has problems during pregnancy with blood clotting in her legs. She managed to advert it this pregnancy, but Tuesday evening we got a call saying she was in the hospital. She has a good sized blood clot in her leg and several small floating clots (not sure of the technical name) in her brain.

I talked to her on Wednesday night and she was pretty discouraged because of her baby. She is in the worst hospital in Tegucigalpa. It is the public hospital and proof that socialized medicine doesn't work. The 6th Floor is where all the adults with non-life threatening illnesses go. It is made up of many wards with 4 beds each in them. Each ward is made up of plywood walls that go 3/4 of the way to the ceiling. The floor is tile that is so broken you would cut your foot on it if you were brave enough to be walking without shoes on. The beds are old and to lower or lift them you must go and ask for the special tool to operate it. The sheets that cover the bed may be washed (who knows), but have blood stains and holes in them. There are no pillows, air conditionings, fans, tvs, or anything to do. You just have to lay there. The doctor comes once a day in the morning. After that there is nothing to keep you occupied. I wanted to take pictures, but I was afraid I would get kicked out. There was even a sign on the window that said, "Please take care of our hospital, don't throw trash out the windows."

Anyway, when I talked to Xiomara she was pretty discouraged about not being able to have her baby with her. This is her second baby, but her first one to nurse. She told me how much she was enjoying this time with her baby. Since she had been in the hospital (over 24 hours) she hadn't been able to see her baby. I decided to bring her a pump and some bottles so she wouldn't lose her supply before she went home.

We got to the hospital on Thursday morning and tried to get in to see her. We got as far as the elevators and a guard came running in trying to get me to go to labor and delivery. I know I look much bigger than most pregnant Honduran women, but this guy refused to believe that I was not in labor. I told him that I still had 10 weeks to go and finally he left me alone. He then told us that we had to use the stairs as the elevators were just for patients. You must understand that while the floor Xiomara was on is numbered the 6th floor, Hondurans have a funny way of numbering floors. You must first go up the lobby and lower level stairs before you get to the 1st floor. The man at the stairs stopped us and told us that we would have to get a pass. In the many times Jason has been in the hospital this is the first time we have ever had to get a pass. He told us the pass was from 2:00 pm on, but he would let us in at 11:30. It was 10:30 and I still had school to teach, but I was just relieved that he was going to let us in . We asked where do we go to get a pass. He told us to ask the guards at Porton 1 (Gate 1) and they would issue it for us.

Another problem is that while they may know where Porton 1 is; we, who don't come to this hospital have no clue. We tried following his directions and ended up at labor and delivery (I think these people don't believe me). We asked a nurse there where to go and she told us outside. We went outside and asked the guard and he told us in the back of the hospital. Needless to say, by the time we actually found Porton 1, I was about to go into labor from all of the walking. We were able to get our permission easily and went over to Dunkin Doughnuts to wait the extra 15 minutes we had. Normally this would be great, but there is nothing worse than a woman that can't have sugar sitting for 15 minutes in a doughnut shop. I did get a egg sandwich so the torture wasn't too bad, but Jason helped me out of my dilemma and ate two doughnuts just so I wouldn't feel bad. Sometimes his kindness amazes me (for those of you who don't know me that was pure sarcasm).

At 11:30 we got back to the hospital and were actually let in and allowed to ride the elevator. I was so thankful for that. We got to visit Xiomara and I showed her how to use the pump and by the time we left she was feeling much better about the prospect of nursing her baby again when she left the hospital.

Because of the much rain we have been having there have been many mud slides and many retaining walls have fallen. I took a couple of pictures of one that had fallen into a pharmacy the night before. It is a blessing that the heaviest rainfall has happened during the night and no one was in the building. We are supposed to get at least 5 more days of rain before this front is over. Most of the rivers and towns are underwater. Many say that this flooding and rain is worse than when Hurricane Mitch came through Honduras. The only difference now is that things are happening a bit more slowly as the rain has been falling all day, every day for almost two weeks now.

After today I am so thankful for the Honduras Medical Center and for a home that is not on the side of a cliff.