Lucas

Today my baby is 9 months old! Normally this is the "you've been out as long as you were in" milestone, but as you're fully aware, Lucas is an exception...

Look at how small he was when he came home, compared to today! He's tripled his weight since then and is now 18 lbs of chub. I sure do love him.

Here's a look at how he's grown since coming home after 10 weeks in the NICU.

Due Date Picture

I realized that I left a lot of the details of Lucas' NICU stay out. I pretty much left it off at his big scary nuclear scan where they were trying to see if there was a connection that kept making the mass on his liver grow. It was a good theory, but ultimately wasn't the case.

A few days after that, they did some blood work and found that the mass was still causing major problems. It was putting huge stress on his liver function. There was even a brief moment where they had included oncology, and talked about transferring Lucas to the Denver Children's Hospital in case a liver transplant became necessary... Thankfully that never happened. They found out that his vitamin K level was low, so they gave him a shot of vitamin K and he responded to that immediately. That was encouraging, because it showed it wasn't a tumor, and that if the abscess was taken care of for good, then it would most likely solve all his problems. Major surgery became the only solution. 

On September 11, 2014 the surgery was performed. The surgeon made a 3 inch incision and found that mass was the size of a ping pong ball. Keep in mind, he was only about 5 lbs at this time, so that size of a mass is even more astounding. After slicing it open it was found that it was full of puss, so they cleaned it out, and left it open inside of him for his body to absorb. The surgeon said that after seeing it, that it was no wonder that it didn't respond to the antibiotics. It was so large and so thick, that the antibiotics had no way of penetrating it. After the surgery, the antibiotics finally did what they were supposed to do and killed off any bacteria that was causing harm. Lucas was only on pain killers for less than 24 hours and bounced right back. He steadily improved from there.

Lucas had one more surgery to repair a hernia a couple weeks later. That poor kid was sure put through a lot. But the day finally came! We took him home on October 4, just a few days before his actual due date.

I am so incredibly grateful for the dedication his doctors and nurses had. Lucas sure was a unique case. I am even more grateful for the Gospel of Jesus Christ for giving us comfort when nobody could give us good news, and for strengthening us to be able to handle all this madness. I admit that I didn't handle it all gracefully, but now I realize that handling trying times gracefully isn't the measuring stick I should be using. As long as I'm praying, listening to promptings and clinging to the hope of the Gospel, that's really all I could have done. I'm human, so there's no way I could ever handle something like that perfectly. I did my best to keep trying and keep hoping, and there's not much else I could have done beyond that, and that's okay. The experience brought me closer to the Savior, so the trial served it's purpose in that way. I just never want to repeat it. haha.

Now, Lucas has been completely off oxygen since Christmas, he's just starting to eat solids, and he's so chubby he can't figure out how to roll onto his belly from his back. Though he is perfectly content being on his back and watching the world, so his motivation to move around is lacking. He is off all medications, and has a clean bill of health. My little miracle baby.