Better and bizarre...

Okay, this has been a weird day. First and foremost, Matthew is doing much better today. He is a lot more active and is having fewer episodes of dropping his heart rate and oxygen saturation. These are all good signs that he is feeling much better. In addition, he is starting to have more normal looking stools without blood in them. His color even looks better today. They don't want to keep him on the ventilator for a long time because of his Chronic Lung Disease, so they are starting to wean him off it and they may extubate him this weekend. Praise God for answered prayers!!

So, the bizarre thing that happened, is that the doctor who has Matthew tonight and this weekend thinks he does NOT have NEC, but does have a problem with his intestines and some kind of unknown infection. We looked at several of his x-rays tonight and they show the intestines are dilated but they don't have the pneumatosis (air in the intestinal lining) that shows signs of NEC. The bizarre thing is that Jason and I saw the x-rays the other doctor showed us which had the pneumatosis. So what's so bizarre about that? Well, tonight the x-rays that we saw yesterday, couldn't be found. We saw ones that looked similar to the ones from yesterday but they did not have the pneumatosis. Hmmmm...bizarre. Anyway, the doctor said that they are going to monitor his intestines and that they may actually try to feed him a tiny bit of milk over the weekend, depending on how they look. The theory behind this is that she doesn't think he has NEC, and the milk will actually help reduce the amount of acid build up in his stomach so there is no need to wait a couple of weeks to start back up on feedings. They did assure us that they won't give him milk until his intestines are looking much better.

To add to this bizarreness, they think the reason he might have crashed so hard was that he was having a systemic reaction to the eye drops that he received. Apparently, these drops are pretty powerful drugs and he was having a reaction to them. There is another baby in the NICU that also had a similar reaction to the eye drops and they had to perform CPR on him too. So with the eye drops and the morphine they gave for pain while trying to get the deep IV line, he just couldn't handle it all. The day was stressful enough for him and then when you add the drugs on top of that, he just couldn't tolerate any of it. This of course makes me a bit nervous for his next eye appointment.

I am very encouraged today with his condition and continue to feel at peace with all that is going on. I really feel that God has answered our prayers! Thank you all very much for your prayers. Please keep praying, especially for him to really not have NEC and that his intestines heal completely and whatever infection he has goes away. Please also pray that the doctors can figure out what is going on with his intestines because they are not sure about what is happening...AGAIN! They are still stumped with him, as usual. I personally think that God is healing his body before they can diagnose anything and He is not letting things get worse enough to truly put a label on anything. Afterall, they keep saying that Matthew never has the "classic" signs of anything and he's an enigma which they can't figure out. This apparently is pretty unusual, because normally they can tell you what is wrong, but they are still scratching their heads with him. Let's take the NEC for example, they saw x-rays that showed signs of him having it, then suddenly his x-rays aren't showing anything like what we saw. Did he have it and God healed it so now they think he doesn't have it, or did he really have it at all? All I can say is that Jason and I saw the x-rays that showed signs of NEC, now we don't see it on the x-rays. Who knows... obviously only God knows, and I am truly thankful that God is in control and that Matthew is doing so much better today. Give thanks and glory to God!!!