The Story of Some Good News for Reagan

Your prayers are working, keep them coming.

The good folks in the NICU here at CHLA just did a procedure on Reagan and it has given us some positive results so far.

They wanted to give him some more artificial surfactant in the hopes that it would lead to more efficient lung operation.  They were waiting for the results of some more blood tests to see if the previous treatments were doing the job of increasing the O2 and decreasing the CO2 in his blood.  The tests came back good so they prepped for the procedure to give him more surfactant.  There were risks though.  Once a baby is more than 48 hours old, additional surfactant might not do any good, and in fact might be harmful.  If his body reacted adversely to the additional surfactant they would have to immediately place him on the ECMO machine.

To do the ECMO, they would have to hook him up to an iron lung, cut into his carotid artery, and use the machine to bypass his heart, oxygenate his blood then pump it back into him.  Very risky.

Fortunately, he accepted the surfactant and they saw an immediate, though minor improvement in his O2 and CO2 numbers.  I'm going back into the NICU to get an update at 9pm and then if things are still improving I'm headed to the hotel around the corner (I've been up since 2am).

More updates tomorrow.

PS:  I'm super tired and have proofread this thing three times and every time I found a punctuation, spelling, or grammer error.  I'll clean it up tomorrow.

Thanks again for your prayers, keep them coming.

Phil