It is with great joy that I bring good news to everyone this evening.
First of all, they switched out the ECMO machine late this afternoon without a hitch. No problems!
Second, we talked with Dr. Kays. He performed another chest x-ray and there was improvement in her lung development since Thursday of last week!!! Since he changed out the ECMO machine, he wants to give her a couple of days longer on ECMO, still holding out hope that her stats can improve a bit more. He would like to see her stats stabilize and increase forward over the next day or so, remove her from ECMO on Wednesday or Thursday and then do the surgery.
As you can tell, he really does not want to perform surgery on ECMO either! Maybe Ella keeps hearing him talk about it, and decides to fight a little bit harder, just to make his decision tougher!
Actually, I think this is a direct testimony to all of you that are praying for Ella each and every day. Dr. Kays did not expect to see this much improvement in Ella over the past few days. This can only be directly tied to God’s hand moving in a miraculous way. And believing that prayer is powerful, we want to thank each of you for your support and prayers.
Dr. Kays decided to turn down the flow in the ECMO machine today (since he replaced the circuit) to 100 (we started at 220 and decreased in increments of 20, down to 120 as the lowest point before turning it back up to 160 last week). He will be monitoring her stats to see if she can stabilize and improve with the lower flows. Please continue to be fervent in prayer – – we still are holding out hope that Ella might be able to have surgery off of ECMO.
Finally, her pink head band that I wrote about last night. There is a story behind this one. Since I did not see Ella due to my ER visit, I just assumed that it was provided by the NICU. There are more girl babies in the NICU right now (Ella was the first baby girl with CDH since 2 years ago; all the other patients have been baby boys). Anyway, I just figured it was a standard item that all the baby girls would get to enjoy.
When we visited tonight, why was my baby girl the only one that looked so fashionable? We found out that the ECMO technician, Roger, that Josh and I have spent many late nights with by Ella’s bedside, went and got it for her. Isn’t that too cute? Then, when we arrived today, a nurse by the name of Joy added the bows to her headband. Way too cute!
Ella was awake and looking at us this evening, giving us those eyes of hope and gripping us to tell us that she is still fighting.
