Ethan's Story - Hospitializations and Surgeries during his first year

The first year of Ethan's life has been evenful and full of stress and multiple blessings!  After he came home from the NICU he had weekly blood draws to check his metabolic readings and a couple of close calls with his potassium that brought us into the ER.  The ER doctors and nurses knew me by name during those first couple of months!  It became a regular part of our life and sadly the other kids adjusted very quickly.  We would have a blood test done on a Friday and be on our way to a basketball game to watch Jake play or Gracie cheer and would get a call from a frantic nurse who got the results from Friday and were instructing us to immediately go to the ER.

His first overnight stay at the hospital was in February just two months after he was sent home from the NICU/PCN.  In the middle of the night he started running a fever, grunting in pain and stopped eating.  I knew instantly that he had a UTI.  We went to the ER where they drew his urine and it was so cloudy, dark and filled with blood that I began to weep and knew that my poor guy was in a world of pain.  We knew that at 6 months the doctors wanted to perform surgery to repair the obstruction and re-construct his urters but they quickly decided it would happen a whole lot sooner.  He stayed in the hospital for 3 days and was sent home on a new prophalactic antibiotic and orders to visit the cardiologist so that they could approve his surgery early.

The next visit was the BIG SURGERY.  The formal term is pyeloplasty.  They also reconstructed both ureteras, repaired his hernia and did a circumcision. The surgery was supposed to last 4 hours but ended up taking 7 hours.  They gave us a pager and called us every hour to update us but it was the longest 7 hours of our lives.  We were so scared.  Putting him under anestesia so young was very scary but we had faith in our doctors and Our God and knew it was not in our hands.  He spent 13 days in the PICU (pediatric ICU).

This picture was taken during the middle of the night after his surgery right after the nurses had to call for a doctor to come to the floor because his stats were dropping quickly and his heart rate was in the 30s. They had to bag him and paddle him and all I could do was stand back and watch.  That was a hard night...The next day he received two blood transfussions.

They made the incision from one side of his abdomen to the other side.  He had stents inserted in his kidneys and bags coming out of both sides for urine flow.

Ethan stayed on the vent for 4 days.  We were asked to leave the room when they took the vent out.  He flat lined during the procedure but the wondeful doctor and nurses were able to save our sweet boy!

After 13 days in the hospital Ethan came home only to return to the hospital two weeks later.  He tested positive for RSV.  While he was still struggling to recover from major surgery he had to fight off RSV.  He was very week and almost ended up on a vent again.  We were lucky to avoid it.  He stayed in the hospital in the PICU for another 10 days.

A couple of weeks later he was back in to have his kidney stents removed and that was an easy procedure and we actually got to leave the same day!!