Baby's Here! And He's A Trouble Maker!

Hi All, Well as I start this post its 3:15 am and I am in the waiting room at The University of Michigan-Motts Children Hospital, Pediatric Intensive Care Unit. I'll get to why in a moment. At 5:53 pm Jess delivered via c-section a 7 pound, 7 ounce, bouncing baby boy! When they pulled him out he was crying and everything seemed okay but he was rather pale, so much so I noticed it. Well they cleaned him up and took some photos for us and then the nurses wanted to take him away to the special care unit (spu). The nurses mentioned that they wanted to check out some things as he was quite pale. They had me come with. It was rather weird obviously something was up I just had no idea what. They got him down to the spu and started doing all this stuff. Giving gases to the baby, starting IVs, etc., it was scary. They really weren't telling me too much other than they thought it was a respiratory issue or a cardiac issue. I was initially hoping respiratory. I'm not sure how bad respiratory can get, but a heart issue is scary. So they started running xrays on the little guy and telling me they had a cardiac specialist on the way. At this point, I was starting to freak. Poor Jess doesn't know whats going on, our families don't, no one. So Jess was out of surgery at this point and recovering in 329. I went down to fill her in on the little I did know, pretty much nothing. Well the xray came back clean, meaning no respiratory issues. That's when I was starting to worry. The cardiac specialist showed up and started doing an echocardiogram on our strong little dude. He did it for about 20 minutes, and at one point said to me where do you want to go, UofM or Childrens Hospital. Ahhhh, for what? So he proceded to tell me that our little baby has Transposition, where the aorta and pulmonary arteries are reversed. A good site to check out what this is all about is here: http://www.americanheart.org/presenter.jhtml?identifier=11074

There are some benefits of being a baby, he has a small hole and a small artery which are doing the work of what the aorta and pulmonary arteries should be doing. The first procedure that needed to be done was to make the small hole bigger so it could do the work it was already doing more efficiently. That was where the rushing started and why the cardiac specialist asked UofM or Childrens, we need to know right now. Being the UofM grad in the family, I thought well there's no choice here! Jess and I decided UofM at which then it was decided that our strong little fighter would get a Survival Flight. Yup he got a sweet helicopter ride on the UofM Survival Flight. You should see this team when they role in. They come in like its Top Gun! Chests out, in their maize and blue, air force pilot like, survival suits. The just command so much attention. They had an entourage of the 4 member team, security guards, paramedics etc. They just jump right in and take over. Directing the Providence nursing staff, telling us whats going on, putting up with pictures etc. They got the little guy all set up for flight. When they came in he wasn't doing so well, but when they finished stabilizing him he was in great shape. So good that they figured they might be able to put off doing the procedure of opening the small hole bigger until 7am this morning. So once this procedure is done today, little man will completely stabilize, then comes the big daddy, open heart surgery to repair the transposed arteries. That will occur within the next ten days. They will do a surgery to essentially flip the arteries around. The success rate is about 95-98 percent on these surgeries. It will take about 5 hours to do the surgery. One of the surgeons from the cardiac team here at UofM just got done telling me he thinks everything will work out great. Our strong little guy is currently in great shape, his oxygen levels are up his blood is 100% saturated and he's got a great blood pressure etc. So although this has been the absolute craziest, scariest, emotional day of my life and I think I can safely say Jessica's, I think, pray and hope its all going to work out. So if you can please say some prayers for our little man, he can definitely use them and yes he still has no name yet! :)

Jess will be fine, she had surgery so you can imagine that that, ontop of all this news was rough, but she held it together 1 Million times better than I. She is a tropper and deserves all the credit in the world. She got to see our little man but missed out on all the craziness of the Survival Flight team. I took many pics and videos of these guys working their magic. I must say it was surreal doing so, I felt weird taking photos of my son getting all this work done to him, but we had to document it. The whole team was joking that he just used up all of his teenage misbehaving points, I said that's right and for the cost of this high tech helicopter ride he isn't getting a car until he's 30, I'll definitely be pulling all these photos and videos out when the time is right and saying see what you did to us, you better behave. It was a nice bit of humor at a crazy time.

Of course I forgot to bring my upload cord but I will hopefully be able to post pics tomorrow.
Jess is at providence and probably will be for a few days, I'm at U of M right now and we'll be here a good part of the time, I'm going home tomorrow to get some sleep, but will be back out here I'm sure tomorrow.

One more thing before I end this crazy long post. I can't say enough about the staff at St.Johns Providence, Uof M Survival Flight and the nurses and doctors here at U of M. They are incredible! Through all this craziness not only did they go above and beyond the call of their duties medically, they kept us informed, filled us in, answered all our questions, rubbed our backs, etc. I'm truly grateful for each and everyone of them and will never forget all they did to help our little guy.