Welcome to the daily blog/update site for the well-being
of the newest addition to the Hemenover family – Ava Jane. Before we get into any details we would like
to thank all of our friends and family who may be reading this. We have had an over whelming out pouring of
support, thoughts, and prayers. For this
we cannot be grateful enough to have each and every one of you here to support
us and help us along what we hope is a very short-lived journey.
We have decided to use this mode of communication to
provide regular updates and to post pictures.
We did not want all of this information to be posted to Facebook for the
world to see and comment on, so we felt this is a bit more private and
personal. Feel free to share this
information with anyone whom may be interested in updates on Ava and our
family. Please respect our privacy by
not posting any of this information to any other form of social media.
Some may know the details already, but we thought it
would help to give everyone an insight to how we ended up here at Comer
Children’s Hospital in Chicago.
We had an appointment at 8:00 am on the morning of the 17th
– on Ava’a actual due date - to begin the induction process. Mason and Ryan stayed with Mimi and Papa the
night of the 16th and I do believe Ava wanted us to know she was
calling the shots on this one as I actually went into active labor Thursday
night. Contractions began about 11:30 pm
Thursday and progressed quickly over the next hour and half. At 1:15 am we decided it was time to take a
ride to Riverside. Oh yea I forgot to
mention we were test driving minivans until about 9:00 on the 16th
as well. Matthew until the day he dies
will stand by the fact that Ava simply was telling us that she WILL NEVER drive
or ride in a minivan. Or at least this
is his last ploy to get us NOT to buy one.
We arrived at Riverside about 1:30 AM. With the contractions I was experiencing, the
intervals between them, and with a little motivation from Matthew (because I am
pretty sure he was not at all interested in taking me home in my current state)
they quickly admitted me. Progress came fast,
by 2:45 AM my water broke and I quickly dialed to 5cm and had the epidural in
place – so for the time being -- life was good….
The nurses mentioned when my water broke that they had
noticed some meconium present, but did not make any major concern about
it. Meconium is essentially when the
baby poops inside of you before it is born.
Really gross and puts the baby under additional stress – but for the
most part common.
Resting now and not feeling my legs from the waist down I
began to feel nauseous. Tried to fight
it off for about an hour or two, but they finally gave me some meds to cut the
nausea which knocked me out like a light.
At about 6 AM, I was just past 8cm.
With only having to push for a short time with my previous pregnancies
they called the doc in stat!
When Dr. Taylor arrived he was his normal jovial self and
said “Let’s have a baby!” As I awoke
from my sleep I agreed. The anti-nausea
meds still kicking my tail I began pushing and with 5 hard pushes and a ton of
great encouragement from Matthew, including him having to wake me up every time to
push, Ava Jane was born at 6:56 AM.
Knowing there was meconium present the pediatrician Dr.
Garcia and her nurse were in the room waiting for Ava to arrive. They immediately began suctioning her mouth
and nose which is very typical. Then
they began to suction her stomach, and at this point approx. 5-6 minutes after
delivery Ava had only made a couple very short and small cries. They took her to the nursery where they began
to work on her more extensively. I not
knowing the extent of her well-being and under the trance of the anti-nausea
meds could not keep my eyes open so I fell back asleep.
Matthew went to visit her in the nursery soon after they
left and quickly noticed the amount of commotion happening around her. Dr. Garcia came out and spoke to him and said
they would need to get a chest X-ray to see how extensive the damage was in her
lungs, in the mean time they had put her on a ventilator to help her
breath.
About 20 mins later Dr. Garcia came to the room and told
us that Ava had extensive blockage in her lungs and that she had aspirated some
of the meconium while she was still inside the womb. Due to the aspiration she
was now extremely worried about her blood “gas” numbers. She also told us that Riverside’s nursery is
not a Level 3 (Neo-Natal Intensive Care Unit – NICU) and are simply not
equipped to handle as case like Ava’s and that she had already called
University of Chicago and the helicopter is already in route to Riverside to pick
her up.
The helicopter picked her up at 9:30 AM and flew her
directly to the UofC NICU. They allowed
me to be in the nursery with her until the helicopter crew took her – which
could have possibly been some of the hardest 2 hours of my life thus far… Matthew and his mom left immediately to go be
with Ava and my mom stayed with me in Kankakee.
He released me from the hospital exactly three and a half hours after my
delivery, so my mom and I left for Chicago.
We met Matthew and Claudie at Comer Children’s Hospital
about 11:30 on Friday the 17th.
Shortly after our arrival we met with the Attending
doctor who gave us a full download on Ava’s status. She talked about all the different options
and steps which they would try first before they tried others. She mentioned that the next 24 hours were the
more critical for her and that our worst case scenario would be that Ava would
have to be hooked to an external lung and heart bypass machine while her lungs
heal.
Now there are scary things that happen with kids, they
fall down and cut their leg, they tip over their bike and scrape their knee,
but when a doctor tells you that we may have to hook your 6-hour old daughter
to a machine that will drain all the blood out of her body, run it through a
machine to add oxygen to it, and then pump it back into her 6-hour old body –
it got very real.
For the next several hours there were at least 6-10
nurses, doctors, cardiologists, lung specialists, pediatricians, etc… at her bedside
monitoring every last detail and every blimp on the radar screen. We began to learn some of the lingo that they
are using like, blood gasses, PO2’s, CO2’s – all of which was foreign language
to us but not one of the nurses, doctors or specialists ever overlooked our
questions, or inquiries. We learned that
blood gasses are the key to her entire puzzle.
These numbers which were tested every hour on the hour are the key
indicator of how much oxygen is being allowed into her lungs and how much carbon
dioxide is being let out.
After the first 10 hours of her being at Comer’s we met
with the doctor doing her fellowship in the NCIU who was on for the night
shift. Up to this point they had run
through and tried options 1-4 that the Attending doctor had informed us about
as soon as we arrived. Option five being
the heart and lung bypass machine. As we
sat with the doctor in the family waiting room at 10:30 pm on the 17th Matthew questioned the amount treatment options we were throwing at her. Wondering if we needed to give her some time to adapt to each. By this time we had an
opportunity to really get our heads wrapped around what the bypass machine
worked and how invasive it is. The
doctor agreed and said “Yes have been moving fast, but it is because your
daughter is very sick and because she is so sick we need to make sure that if
something is not working the way it should immediately, we need to make a
change immediately to offer her the best chance to come out of this.”
There was a moment when the gurney rolled out of the
nursery at Riverside to the helicopter that we were very scared of what the
outcome may be. As we sat in the waiting
room 12 hours later and had the doctor tell us basically some things are
working and others are not – it was time to start praying.
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