Not what we expected...at all!

So I was talking to one of my best friends today on the phone after Ethan's surgery and she told us that we should go and buy a lottery ticket. Everything that has happened to us in the past 5 months has been rare....like doctors seldom see it! My complication with Ethan's pregnancy only happens to 1% of pregnant women (more on that and the birth story post soon) and now!

Around 10:30am this morning Ethan went into surgery. The plan was to go in there and remove the scar tissue that they thought was causing the partial obstruction and look at it to make sure there wasn't any damaged intestines. When the surgeon went in he realized it was something completely different. When Ethan was in the NICU he had a surgery to place a VP shunt to guide the fluid that his brain wasn't absorbing into his tummy. Well it turns out that the end of the VP shunt(which is in the abdomen) had created a puesdocyst in his abdomen that was so big that it was putting pressure on his intestines which caused them to get inflamed and didn't allow his food to go down. This is rare and if it happens it usually happens to people who have an "old" shunt (been in there for years) His shunt was placed in August...so its considered new.

Before he went in, they prepared us for the worst which included damaged intestines and so on. So in a way this can be considered decent news we guess. So right now, he has to stay in the hospital. They want to monitor him and make sure the inflammation goes down. Once that happens, his neurosurgeon will move the end of the shunt to a new location then hopefully he can come home!

We are kind of frustrated because the past two weeks of him in that hospital were spent watching him and hoping it would fix itself. They took so many x-rays of his tummy and it turns out that if they would have done an ultrasound, like Jon had been asking for the last two weeks, they would have found it and he would have been in surgery two weeks ago to fix all this.

Otherwise, he is gaining weight well! He smiles all the time...usually when I walk in and start talking to him he smiles. I love it! The nurses comment on how happy he is all the time. He loves to be held and loves a little bouncer chair they have there for him. We are blessed with an amazing child and even though the start of his life has been hard on him we know in our hearts that he will have an incredible life. His past two admissions were due to his tummy issues. I'm hopeful that this will all be in our past soon.

Continue to keep him in your thoughts and prayers pretty please...that everything goes smoothly while he is in the hospital.