Some Good News

This week on Monday we met with a pediatric surgeon and were able to get some more information about what will happen after the baby is born. After she’s born, the neonatology team (who we’ll be meeting with sometime in the next few weeks) will work to stabilize the baby. She’ll need help with breathing right away but the hope will be that her lungs will start to do more on their own and that she’ll stabilize over the first few days. After that, the surgeons would be able to repair the hole in her diaphragm (likely with a synthetic patch) and push the stomach, bowel and liver back down into the baby’s abdomen.

A few things were encouraging to us from Monday’s appointment. One was that the doctor wasn’t too concerned about the mass in the baby’s chest. She said that will just be something they take out when they are doing the surgery. Second, she made it sound like although they don’t see tons of babies with CDH, they are very comfortable with treating them. We also learned that there is a CDH clinic at McMaster where our baby would be followed long term and this clinic follows guidelines that all hospitals in Canada follow for kids with CDH.

Yesterday I had a fetal echocardiogram (ultrasound of baby’s heart) and we got some good news! The heart is still pushed to the right side of baby’s chest and is somewhat squished by her stomach and the other things up in her chest. These are normal CDH things. But the good news is there’s nothing wrong with her heart itself and the doctor saw no fluid! We’re so thankful for that because fluid building up in multiple places would have been really bad for the baby. So we’re thankful for this good news.

This week I read this and found it comforting for our situation (and really any time things don’t seem to be going the way we want/hope):

If God is God and if you and I are not, then we can accept that our limited vision will see only a snapshot in time, while our sovereign Lord has created, upheld, sustained, purposefully determined, and worked through every moment from the beginning of time. – Hope When It Hurts

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities – all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. – Colossians 1:15-17