Thursday, September 2, 2010

Doctors Galore!

Before I start in on the doctor stuff, a cute picture of Carrie enjoying a super yummy double chocolate chip cookie I made a couple of days ago. Good stuff :)
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I only had one appointment this week, but I spent 3 hours in the office! The end "regular appointment" part went really quickly, but first, I spent over an hour just talking with the Neonatologist. He drew pictures of lungs etc., explained things and answered a lot of my questions.
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Unfortunately, most of the answers are "We don't know right now", or "Here's a best-case and a worst-case scenario". Diaphragmatic Hernias have a huge range of severity so there are a lot of things we won't know until Brigham is actually born. A few of the questions we did get a semi-answer to:
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-He'll likely be in the NICU for 4-6 weeks
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-He'll be fed sugars and proteins and fats through an IV for at least the first several days
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-Depending on how his lungs react at birth, he'll be on either an:
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**Oscillating Ventilator (fills up his lungs and then basically vibrates them while it's exchanging O2 and CO2), or an
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**ECMO machine (heart-lung bypass where his blood is continually being taken out through a catheter, sent it through a machine to get rid of CO2 and add O2 and sent back into his body through another catheter)
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-Surgery will likely not be for at least a few days after birth once he's stabilized
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Luckily, as we've been researching it, we've discovered we actually have very very good health insurance and all of Brigham's "stuff" (which the doctor said will probably cost hundreds of thousands of dollars) will only cost us somewhere between 500-1000 dollars. Awesome. :)
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Well, tomorrow we're off to New Mexico for the long labor-day weekend. When we get back I should have some pictures of Carrie playing with her Nana and Papa and cousins!

***OH, I ALMOST FORGOT!!***
Carrie has been sleeping in her big girl bed for the last three nights! Naps are a little trickier (takes longer to fall asleep and sometimes I end up moving her to the crib so she'll actually nap, not just play) but we're working on it. We're so proud of her! It's so cute to see such a little tiny person sleeping in such a big bed!

1 comment:

Jacob & Clarissa said...

Yay for good insurance! That will be nice to have one less thing to stress over.