First of all, thanks so much to all of our friends and family for your prayers and support this past week! We feel so blessed to have such a great support system surrounding us, especially considering the relatively short time we have lived in Mill Valley. So for those of you who didn't hear, or only heard part, here's the scoop:
Noah got a cold (he puts EVERYTHING in his mouth so I am actually surprised this doesn't happen more often!)He started having a runny nose on Monday morning, and by the time he woke up from his nap Monday afternoon he was having trouble breathing. Steve and I got him through the night by using his nebulizer (breathing machine) and holding him most the night. We took him to the doctor first thing Tuesday morning where they gave him a steroid shot to try to keep the cold from getting worse and another breathing treatment. He seemed to improve a bit and when we took him back to the doctor that afternoon the doctor said we would just keep an eye on him and we made a follow up apt. for the next day. We put Noah to bed Tuesday night and he woke up around 9pm really having trouble breathing. Not wanting to risk anything, we took him to the emergency room (thank you Jason and Emily Hew for watching Grace so we could both go to the hospital!) and after watching him for a few hours (including another steroid shot and several more breathing treatments) they decided to admit him. Long story short, over the next few days we had several scary episodes, and lots of doctors in and out. Mainly, we knew that if we could get him over the cold he would be able to breathe fine, but we really wanted to get to the bottom of the problem so that this doesn't keep reoccurring. The doctors concluded that something about his airway is not quite right, and for whatever reason (possibilities include scarring from being intabated during heart surgery, acid reflux, laryngomalacia- "floppy" esophagus)when he gets sick the combination of the swelling from the cold and whatever else is going on is just too much and he has trouble breathing. So we have him on a preventative does of inhaled steroids twice a day through the cold season, and we will be doing a bronchoscopy in about a month so they can look down his esophagus and see what is going on. They already did a brief scope looking down as far as his vocal chords, and didn't see anything (good news!) but they think there may be something farther down that they could see with the bronchoscopy. Unless there is anything huge such as a lot of scarring, we wouldn't do anything except for wait for him to grow, and as his esophagus gets bigger hopefully the issues will go away. A lot more answers should be coming soon, but for now Noah is getting over his cold and definitely back to his normal goofy self. We flew to Phoenix today for Thanksgiving and a routine Echo cardiogram (which is good we had scheduled since some of the medicine he was on for his breathing can stress the heart). I will post briefly to let everyone know how the echo goes. Thanks again for all your prayers, I really don't know of any baby Noah's age who has had as many people pray for him as Noah has. I can't wait to see what God has planned for his life!
