BeautyRevealed | The Blog of Melissa J. Dillon

To all those who have called, written, and commented: THANK YOU for all of your prayers and support. It means a lot to us and we don’t take it for granted for a second. Please don’t get offended if it takes us a while to begin returning calls! Hopefully this blog can serve as our primary communication device until everything slows down and we are able to start contacting everyone. I know we have about a billion voicemails to return. At the moment our days are completely filled by feedings, room and board changes, meetings with nursing staff, vast and overwhelming amounts of paperwork, insurance policy information, and a few moments of peace and quiet with Ava. We haven’t been to bed before 1am for a number of nights now—and nighttime feedings occur about every two hours. Thank you for spreading the word though about our little Ava. It’s amazing to see family and friends come together in support of one precious little baby. It has been very humbling experience. Please continue to forward our website address and Ava’s story to any friends you know who might be willing to pray for her.

As for Ava, we were able to speak with the neonatal surgeon and go over the most recent set of her ultrasound pictures, which were taken yesterday morning. From what they can tell, it appears she has either 1) A duodenal web, which is a partial blockage of the duodenum (the duodenum is right below the stomach), or 2) a fluid filled cyst which is completely independent from all her organs. Both of these things would be considered better than duodenal atresia, which is a complete blockage of her digestive system [and which is also what they thought they saw on the prenatal ultrasound]. The easiest and least invasive of these options would be a fluid filled cyst. If it is, in fact, just a cyst which resides independent from the rest of her digestive system then the surgery would basically end up being an outpatient one and we could likely be on our way home by the end of next week! If they determine it is a duodenal web then the scope of the surgery would be a little more detailed and the recovery time would increase to around 1 or 2 weeks. They will be running a dye test Monday and they will have the results the same day. And so it goes. More waiting is in store for us! At this point we just want to take her home and give her a quiet room to sleep in and a relaxing place to call her own. She is doing wonderfully though and she is by far the LOUDEST baby in the NICU—because most of the babies in the NICU are premature most of them don’t have fully developed lungs yet. Ava has made quite sure to let us know her lungs are more than adequately developed though.

If you think about it please also pray that Ava continues to feed better. We have been trying to breastfeed her but I think it is harder for Ava to feed with so many wires on her and noises in the room. There are all sorts of alarms going off in the room throughout the entire day.

Also please pray for Melissa. She has had to manage all of this while getting 2-5 hours of sleep a night lately. She wants to make sure everyone is focused on praying for Ava but I would ask that you also pray for Melissa. She has shown incredible strength throughout all of this and has been entirely focused on being there for Ava. She’s already an outstanding Mom.

That’s all for now. I’ll try and get an update put up on Monday night or Tuesday morning with the results of the dye test they are planning. We are going to try and focus on slowing things down this weekend and try to make sure we get some sleep. I hope you guys are all doing well and thank you again for all of the kind words we’ve received.

-Mark

Tags: Ava, Pregnancy

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 6th, 2010 at 5:23 pm and is filed under Melissa. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.