The NICU is a Roller Coaster and I Forgot My Dramamine

Having such a good first week of life, Ryan and I were excited to see the progress Landon would make in his second week. However, on Wednesday when he was a week and a half old, he started to act funny. His stomach started to swell up and distend and his blood pressure began to fall. The doctors weren't quite sure what was happening but watched him closely. As the day processed, his stomach began to get bigger and started to turn darker and darker. The doctors began to be concerned he had a dangerous infection that is common in preemies called NEC. Basically, NEC is an intestinal infection that causes a baby's intestines to start to die. Eventually, a hole or multiple holes can form in the intestines and spill their contents into the baby's abdominal cavity causing sepsis and possible death.

This sounded like a pretty terrifying infection and we prayed he didn't have it. As the day went on, he got sicker and sicker. Finally, around 10pm his stomach had gotten so black that the doctors requested our permission for the surgical team to cut a small hole in his abdomen to see if they could determine the cause of the swelling and discoloration. We were pretty terrified but knew something had to be done to make our baby feel better. We waited for about an hour for the surgeons to come back out. In the NICU many procedures are actually performed at the baby's bedside so the baby doesn't have to be moved. The surgeons finally came out and confirmed our worst fear, Landon had a hole or perforation in his bowel and the contents had spilled into his abdomen, causing the distention and discoloration. They were able to clean out a lot of the mess and decided to leave a small drain in his side to let the stomach contents continue to drain out.

On top of this, they told us they may have to go back in to do a larger surgery to actually remove the portions of his bowel that had the hole in them and anywhere there may be dead intestines. However, they couldn't do it that night because he was too sick to withstand that type of surgery. The fear was that if enough of his intestines were affected, he would have lifelong issues with eating and absorbing nutrition. We were devastated. It seemed so unfair for our baby to survive the odds when it came to his lungs only to face an even bigger battle. It was so hard to just watch him suffer when we wanted nothing more than to pick him up and take him away from there. We knew he was in the right place and that people all over the world were praying for him, but it was still difficult to see.