Catching Up!

Some of you have asked me if I was gonna start blogging again. I have thought about it and it is something I want to start again. The last several months have been a complete blur but things are finally starting to get back to normal. Or at least our version of normal for now. Not only do I want to catch everyone up on our life over the past 5 months but I want to use this as a journal to keep up with my sweet baby girl's life. Obviously I can't put the last 5 months in one entry so I will break them up. This first one will be about the first 3 weeks in Baptist South NICU.


When I first got there, after leaving the hospital, I was so nervous about seeing her. I mean Daniel had brought me back pictures but as you know pictures just aren't the same. I walked in and saw my baby, mask over her eyes, bright light shining down on her, several tubes coming out of her, a tube breathing for her, no clothes on, just laying there...so helpless. I got this huge knot in my stomach and just started crying. I mean, I was her mommy....why could I not help her? The nurses were really nice and came over and answered all of our questions. They told us that she had an infection that she had gotten when they put the tube down her throat. They told us that it would be the first of many and that all preemie babies get infections. (Let me just say that this was her one and only infections as of today). The next couple days were pretty much the same. Then we spoke with a doctor who told us that due to her being so early, they needed to do an ultrasound of her head because she was at risk for having a brain bleed. He didn't go into any more detail at that time. The next day however he wanted to sit down with us in a conference room and talk so we knew something was wrong. He started out by drawing a diagram and showing us the 4 stages of a brain bleed. 1 being not that bad 4 being the worst. After this he proceeds to tell us that she has a grade 3 on one side of her brain and a grade 4 on the other. We were completely devastated. He proceeded to tell us that she would more than likely have some very bad disabilities. Things like Cerebal Palsy, blindness, Mental Retardation, Deafness, ect. He proceeded to say that the brain is a complex thing that they still don't have mapped out so there was no way to tell how she would respond. He said he had seen grade 4 bleeds that caused detrimental effects to where the children could not funtion in normal life and he had seen grade 4 bleeds that you would never know the child had it. So he did leave us with a little hope. He told us that the nurses were going to start measuring her head circumference daily because if started to grow too rapidly that could mean that she had developed Hydrocephalus, which is basically fluid on the brain, which would be caused from the blood blocking the normal fluid drainage pathways. This would mean she would need surgery to put a shunt in her brain. So this was something we worried about daily. We sat in that conference room for the longest time just holding each other and crying. It hit us so hard that this was happening to our little girl. It was one of the hardest things I ever had to hear. We prayed about it and decided that we were gonna trust God and have faith that everything would be fine.

I'm gonna cut alot of this short cause if I told every single thing we would be here for a LONG time. It was a whole week before we were able to do anything but touch her briefly. After a week Daniel was able to change her diaper and I was able to pick her up, not hold her, but just pick her up long enough for the nurse to change her sheet. She was only on the ventilator for 2 weeks. She has always had amazing lungs. They took her off and put her on a cpap machine which is basically a sleep apnea machine. That was the day we first got to hold our sweet girl. That was the best feeling in the world. I cannot even put into words how we felt. She was so so tiny but so so beautiful. She did really good with that. She stayed on Cpap for about a week and did really well but then she started having trouble again so they had to put her back on the ventilator. We soon found out it was due to the development of hydrocephalus. All within 24 hours we found this out and were told that she would be taken to The Children's hospital in Birmingham, AL. I hurried home to get things together for us to go up there because they said I had time but by the time I got home they called and said they were on their way. So Daniel was the only one that made it to the hospital to see her off. He was able to talk to her some before the put her in the transport bed. He walked her to the helicopter and took some pictures and then watched them take off with her. He called me and could hardly talk he was crying so hard. He said it was soooo hard to watch her leave like that and not be able to go with her. He got to our apartment and we left and went straight to the Children's Hospital and that's where our next phase began. Here are a few pics from Savannah's time in Montgomery.

This is a pic of Savannah right after she was born being taken to the NICU at Baptist East.


This is my sweet girl hooked up to everything.


This just shows how tiny she was.



First time holding my sweet girl.

Being transported to Children's Hospital.