Please pray for Emma and her family

Here is an update from Emma's Caring Bridge site that I received late last night. I cannot imagine what her parents are going through. Emma is 6 weeks old (I believe) and was expected to have been able to return home by now...and now is facing some pretty significant difficulties that may or may not lead to being opened back up and all the healing starting over againg.

Please pray!

Today has been an interesting day. Emma's chest x-rays have continued to deteriorate over the last few days. Today the did another ultrasound after her chest xray was reviewed trying to identify whether she had a collapsed lung or fluid. It was decided that it was most likely fluid and the best way to proceed was to stop all feeds again and put in another chest tube. Late this afternoon the chest tube went in...and then came back out. If there was fluid build up the chest tube should have drained something right away so when it didn't they pulled it back out. The thought tonight is that maybe she has pulmonary edema so they started more diuretics to get fluid off. If this is the case it should be apparent by tomorrow mornings xray. If there isn't improvement then they will use imaging to guide a chest tube exactly where the pocket of fluid might be. Right now the doctors aren't completely sure what is going on. All of Emma's numbers look ok and she isn't showing signs of issues due to this mystery. We're hoping that the diuretic improves things and that maybe she just has pulmonary edema. My fear if it's pulmonary edema is that we will be hearing more discussions about banding the shunt. We really don't want do put her through that right now because it will be opening her back up and starting the whole healing process again. The xray tomorrow could really determine where we go from here with her. A new chest tube would also likely mean back on TPN and lipids through IV for 2-3 weeks before feeding her again which would also be a step backwards.

Since we can't hang anything from Emma's warmer I took some black and white picture books to prop up in her bed. She is really studying the pictures when she is awake. Tonight we let her watch Baby Beethoven for the first time and she really liked that. I think we are going to have another Baby Einstein addict in the family. Honestly I think she just likes to look at anything other than her warmer, tiled ceiling, and medical equipment but who wouldn't! Except for the 2 trips down to radiology she has no idea anything else exists beyond what little she can see from her bed. One of these days hopefully she can see that there is more to the world beyond West 315 in the CICU... today that day seems a long time from now.