Not good...

Cash went into congestive heart failure on Monday and was taken to the Emergency Room and then Cardiac ICU. At Children's they determined that he had a lot of leaking around his bad valve and that his ventricles were not pumping well. I left my trial and came up to Children's, and Michelle and I spent the night here last night. They are running a bunch of tests on him today, mostly trying to determine if they'll be able to hold off on the heart surgery as long as they want to. The odds on the heart surgery are very good at six months old, but at this age all the doctor would tell us is they're not very good and we'd cross that bridge if we came to it. Part of the problem is that they don't know what caused the failure to come on so quickly (he was fine early Sunday afternoon), and so we are meeting with a lot of different specialists - pulmonary, ENT, cardiology, etc. We know he is going to get a PICC line (which threads through an artery to his heart) and an NG (feeding) tube.

Congestive heart failure for a baby is not irreversible like it is for an adult, so there is still a chance we can come through this without any permanent impairments. Last night was troubling until around midnight, but they seem to have stabilized him since then. He is back to having irregular O2 levels even while on oxygen, which puts us right back to where we were the day he was born. He actually has more wires and IVs than he did the first time he came through - the picture is below. Still the situation is steadily improving from last night - they just took him to 2 liters of O2 from 7 liters last night.

We don't know a lot about the future yet, except that we'll be in the hospital for awhile. They are going to do more tests and are trying some medication on him that will help his heart pump better. The doctors are being typically obtuse about what our milestones are, but I suspect they're watching to see if he can take his medications orally/nasally rather than intravenously, and to see if they can get him back off of oxygen. At some point, if they can't send him home they'll have to do the surgery, but I don't know how much time they're willing to take before they call the shot.
JLL