Not your normal PDA

The neonatal cardiologist visted us. I'll preface this with this: Sadie's okay and this is a normal premie thing to deal with - it just sounds worse than it is. Because she's been on the CPAP for a couple days and is not tolerating being off of it, they decided to check out her heart. Turns out she has the following: "Patent ductus arteriosus (PDA): a small hole in the heart that normally closes by itself, but may be more likely to stay open in preemies" Babies have this hole to bypass the lungs before they are born (since they aren't breathing). Normally (hole closed) the blood goes from the body into the right atrium, then into the lungs, then to the left atrium, and back into the body. With the hole, a portion of the blood goes from the left atrium back into the lungs instead of going into the body. This causes the lungs to work a little harder than they should. For more information and pictures, click here. To correct this, they are going to give her three doses of Indocin (Indomethacin) starting today at noon and happening every 12 hours. Because she's an older preemie, she has a great chance that this will work the first time. They plan on evaluating her again on Tuesday. If the hole is still present, they will try the medication again. The nurse we talked to said that she's only seen two babies Sadie's age not respond to the indocin in her ten years of nursing. But if for some reason it doesn't work, they would preform a simple surgery while she's still in the NICU to close the hole.

Prayer requests:
Please pray the the indocin works the first or second time and she won't need the surgery. Please also pray that this is the reason that she's needed to be on the CPAP and after the hole is closed, her lungs will start working to the point where she doesn't need it anymore.

Mom and Dad:
We are doing well. Liz prepared us by saying what PDA was and that it may be a possibility with Sadie. Because we already knew what it was, we weren't as shocked this morning as we could have been. I had a bit of a hard time yesterday as I realized emotionally that Sadie was going to be in the NICU for a while. My head knew it was going to be a month or more, but I guess it took a while for my heart to catch up. Jen's progressing well and it able to walk more and more with less and less pain.