Tuesday night - still in hospital

Samuel has been in the hospital since early Saturday morning. He was having a very difficult time breathing and we decided he needed to have professional eyes on him. At first they said he likely had an aspiration pneumonia (fluid on his lungs from aspirating after reflux) OR a viral bronchialitis (basically a cold). As it turns out, it seems like it was a minor case of both. But put the two together and it was something of 'an event' as the Drs call it. He was never blue or anything like that, just more coughy and agitated and laboring to breathe more than normal.

He has been in the PICU until this afternoon. They have been having him on Oxygen because his breathing was so labored. The main things they've been working on are getting his spitting up stopped - which is very important b/c the more his spits up the more likely he is to get pneumonia again - and getting him to breathe well on his own again. On the first of those two issues, they put him on 24 hr continuous feeds at a rather low volume. He handled that well until today when he began spitting up again (and he hasn't really stopped since 1 oclock this afternoon).Sara and I have a theory as to why this is (concentrated feeds, from 20 calories to 24 calories) but no one with any medical knowledge is thus far agreeing with us. He also has been weaned off the O2 until this evening when he was having trouble breathing again (not surprising giving all the spitting and refluxing he's been doing).

We had been in the PICU but they moved Samuel to the floor today b/c he was doing well enough to not require intensive care. They had been talking about us going home tomorrow (Wednesday), but now with him spitting so much and if we are to make any new adjustments to his feeding tomorrow, it will likely be longer that we remain in hospital.

Please pray that we can get this reflux thing figured out. He's been on 4 different medications - none have controlled it yet. We remain on just one (Zantac, 3x a day). We have gone to a non-dairy formula to see if he is allergic to dairy, but that hasn't seemed to make a huge difference over the last 10 days (maybe b/c one of the meds he'd been on has lactose in it?!), so we're going to continue that for another two weeks since we're now not taking that medication any more. We've gone to a slow 24 hr/day feeding that had been working but now is apparently not. We're getting pretty tired of the spitting and aspirating. We'd like to get something figured out along these lines. Especially since we're sitting in the hospital in the mean time. Please pray for a definitive answer to this issue. That may be more than we can get, but please pray for it. Our perseverance in wearing thin these days.

Thank you for the many ways you support us. We could not make it without you.
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