God is Good

Sorry I didn't post anything yesterday - I know a lot of people were looking for an update.

Ivan has been in a new room where Mary can stay right there with him and feed him and hold him a lot. I think that's one thing he has needed this whole time - we could not hold him much in the NICU. I've been sleeping at home and keeping Owen at night (Yesterday he spent the day at some friends' house, and today he went up to the hospital with me for a couple of hours. He's not sick at all, so I guess his "spill" on Sunday was just due to gaging on something).

Since we were on a new floor, that meant another new doctor, and another new opinion of what needed to be done and when we could leave. This doctor was younger, and told us right up front that he liked to err on the side of caution. That's not exactly what we wanted to hear.

He thought that Ivan should stay for a few more days ("few" meaning 3 to 7!) to get more antibiotics and to monitor his feeding. The whole thing with the antibiotics was a "just in case" treatment. There was concern about a possible infection, but all of the blood tests have been negative and there have never been any signs of one. However, this doctor said that if there was an infection, the 7 days of antibiotics Ivan has had so far might not be enough to kill it off completely.

Basically, I told him "no". I told him that I was confident that Ivan is fine now, and there is nothing left to do for him except to get him off the feeding tube so that he can eat normally and go home. We talked about it for 20 minutes or so, and he finally just asked us to think about it and said that he would think about it and we would discuss it more the next day (today).

After he left, we talked about praying for Ivan to start eating better and stuff like that, but Mary really felt like God was telling her to pray for that doctor to simply change his mind. So, that's what we did. And can you take a guess what happened?

Well, he came back this morning, and said that he had spoken to the doctor down in the NICU, and that doctor had convinced him that no more treatment was necessary! He stopped the antibiotics this morning, ordered the feeding tube to be removed, and said that as log as Ivan is eating well from the bottle today, we should be discharged this evening.

God is good!

I brought Owen back home at lunch time to feed him and let him take a nap, and we're going to go back up to the hospital for one last time tonight, and come home all together as a family.