A Couple More Bumps

Hello friends! We wanted to thank you for your continued prayer for Payton and ask you to continue to join us in interceeding for her. Yesterday and today have not gone as well as we would have hoped.

Yesterday during the day she did pretty well. Around 5:30 they decided to try and adjust her PICC line (the long term IV line in her arm) because it was slowly working its way out of her. This upset her quite a bit, and they were unable to fix it. They decided to let it be until the anesthesiologist could take a look at it. At about 6:30, when we were putting her back into bed after holding her for awhile, she got fussy. We're not really sure why. She was holding her breath, which is not unusual when she crys. After a few crys she held it for a long time and turned bluish, her heart rate dropped significantly, and she turned a bluish gray color. Her nurse quickly got her breathing again and her heart rate shot back up, but she remained fairly limp. A few seconds later there were several doctors and nurses in the room. She leveled out after about 2 hours, and this morning she looked great! They really don't know what happened. They are still in the process of doing several tests to try to find out. The best guess right now is that it was just the result of her being tired, fussy, and medicated; kind of a bunch of little things that came together at one moment, but we'll see what the tests produce.

So, like I said, she had a great morning and early afternoon today. Then at about 3 they took her to vascular radiology to try and fix her PICC line because the anesthesiologist couldn't fix it either. They had planned to put in a wire through the current PICC, then pull the PICC out over the wire. Then with the wire in, put in a new PICC over the wire so that they wouldn't have to stick her again, and also she wouldn't need to be fully out for this to happen. After 2 hours of working on her they gave up. The original plan failed, so they intubated her (put her on the ventilator again) so that they could put her to sleep, and tried in her other arm, with no luck. They tried every open spot, both legs and the side of her neck that isn't stitched up, but nothing worked. So she is currently back in her room being extubated. When the doctor who did this procedure came and spoke to us afterward he was at a loss for what to do next. He said that they would have to go at it as a team. So most of her doctors will meet sometime soon to try to figure out what to do next. Payton is in no immediate danger. This mostly just slows the process down.

And that's where we are now. It's frustrating to have something like this happen when things are going so well, and when it seemed like there was really only one more thing to work on (feeding). However, we trust that God is both good and sovereign, and that he loves Payton even more than we do.

You can join us in praying for wisdom for the doctors and nurses as they try to figure out what to do next. You can pray that Payton would continue to grow strong and, once again come off the ventilator well. You can also pray that Heather and I would take time to meet with the Lord, and be salt and light to those around us. As you can imagine we have gotten to know a lot of the staff on our floor fairly well. They are good people!