too long and prayer needed

Wow! I can't believe it's been nearly 6 months since my last update - sorry everyone! Ethan has been a normal, busy toddler since his 2nd birthday back in August. I'll give a quick update and then I've got a prayer request to share.

First, Ethan has managed to keep us so entertained as we watch him grow and explore the world around him! Some of his favorites are: Elmo (some things never change! - his absolute favorite movie used to be "Elmo in Grouchland" but now he's hooked on "Sesame Street: Let's Make Music featuring the music group Stomp"), Target (he tells me multiple times a day that he's going bye-bye and when I ask him where, he tells me he's going to Target and (depending on the day he's either buying bananas or apples or cookies!), fruit snacks (especially Food Lion's VeggieTales fruit snacks), apple juice, chocolate (def. my kid!), and he's just now branching out into playing with cars and trains (which he got for Christmas). He's also talking up a storm, turning into quite the social butterfly! He'd be a great greeter for Target or Wal-Mart!

Now, for the prayer request. We are back at UNC with Ethan. We managed to keep him healthy all fall and most of this winter until now. He started on Sunday morning after church having an occassional clear runny nose. Whenever he's had a runny nose in the past, he also gets a cough due to his sensitive gag reflex. Well the coughing got worse and worse Sunday afternoon and Monday morning so we called his pediatrician and got an appt. for Mon. afternoon.

At the appointment, we saw a brand new doc and since she knew from his chart that he's got a heart defect, she decided to check his oxygen saturation. He was about 10 points low (for him) - sats were in the mid 60's to low 70's (instead of upper 70's-low 80's). Next they called our cardiologist (Dr. R) at UNC to see what he recommends we do. Dr. R said to try to put oxygen on him but that just made him more made and dropped his sats a little more. So after fighting Ethan on trying to get oxygen, they called 911 and made us go to an ER. They wanted to send us to the closest one (WakeMed) but I've have personal issues with them in the past and have 0% confidence in having Ethan treated there so they let us go to our choice (UNC) instead. Ethan and I rode at the speed limit in the ambulance to UNC and arrived around 4:30pm. Dan went home to pack an overnight bag. We had a chest x-ray that came back fine then waited until almost 9pm for a decision and then they decided to admit us. I stayed here at the hospital with Ethan last night while Dan slept at home and came back to stay the day with us here.

Late last night after being admitted, Ethan spiked a fever but Tylenol was dispensed and the fever broke. They did run a respiratory culture to test for all types of respiratory illnesses (flue, RSV, etc.) but that won't come back until tonight at the earliest. No fever today, just lots of coughing and nothing they can do to help him (b/c of the stupid recall a few years ago for all kids cold meds). So now it's just a waiting game to see what his cultures conclude and see if he starts feeling worse or better.

Pray we get some answers soon and that we can be patient and wait for those results to come in. Despite sleep deprivation from hospital life and all the coughing, Ethan's shown some increased energy this afternoon and had fun reading books and coloring and cuddling with us a lot. The coughing has been so intense that his gag reflex has been causing him to puke on and off if trying to eat/drink during a coughing spell. He was on a maintenance IV last night to prevent dehydration but that was stopped at 11am and he's been enjoying lots of jello and juice today. He's done fine with those so he's been cleared to start trying solids - he's had 3 graham cracker squares and done fine with that. Ethan's just begging to go home and we are ready to go to - especially since the course of treatment right now is no different than what we'd be doing if we were at home - liquids/semi-solids and lots of cuddling.