Friday, December 21, 2007

much prayer needed

It's been such a tumultuous week. First of all, we found out a good friend of ours, who also goes to our church, was going to have to have heart surgery. In a matter of about 2 days he found out there was a problem, which turns out to have been his heart working at about 50% capacity, to him having a triple bypass this morning. Thankfully, all went well. Of course we are still praying.

Then, last night my sister experienced a nightmare situation...rather than trying to re-tell it, I'll post a portion of an e-mail my brother-in-law sent out:

Last night at about 11:50 we heard Eva (the baby who is 6 months old) made some noise in her bed and thought that maybe she was wanting to get up to eat. So I went in to check on her and she wasn’t still fussing nor had she flipped herself over which she normally does when she wants to get up to eat, so at first I was just going to walk back out of the room and thought maybe she was going to be falling back to sleep, but instead decided to possibly get her up anyway. When I went to pick her up I noticed that she was all wet as if she had possibly peed out, but then quickly realized that it was spit up and that she was trying to throw up again so I quickly rushed her to the sink, where we then realized (in better lighting) that she had no color in her face and her lips were turning purply-greyish, and that she really wasn’t breathing quite right, she was very unresponsive and decided to call for 911. While on the phone Eva began to really struggle to maintain consciousness and started becoming like a rag doll, while we were waiting for the ambulance to arrive God gave us the idea of getting her down to Grandma’s house and get her on oxygen. 2 of the girls from our small group were still at our house playing games since we were having our Christmas party, and they stayed with our 3 older girls. We woke up Uncle Dave and Aunt Beth and they helped keep Eva awake. Aunt Beth had to continue to poke Eva’s feet with sharp objects to try and keep her conscious. At 12:10 there was a turning point when she then started to try and pull the oxygen away from her face and she tried to start holding herself up, she then began to open her eyes farther and be more alert. Some of the best relief was when she smiled at Uncle Dave. The ambulance arrived a minute later and they were very relived to see her status changing for the best, they were prepared for a 'scoop and run'. She did start to slowly get her color back and by 2:00 had only spit up 2 more times and she seemed to be breathing and all vital signs seemed to be great. Around 4:00 they were going to be admitting her upstairs to be able to monitor her for a few more hours to see if anything like this would happen again.

That was as of this morning; since then they had decided to keep her longer, until tomorrow to keep doing tests. They were concerned about her unresponsiveness last night, so today she had a series of tests including cat scan, EKG, EEG, blood & urine tests. Everything so far is coming back good, but she is now throwing up again and having diarrhea. They are still planning to send her home tomorrow, but she will have a monitor that she will need to be hooked up to any time she is sleeping, or might fall asleep - like in the carseat, stroller, etc - for the next 2 months. My sister is understandably quite shaken, and, I know, nervous about bringing the baby home. She said she's actually glad for the monitor, to know at least she will be alerted if something would happen again.

At this point, I would really appreciate any and all prayers for Baby Eva, for perfect health and never another episode like this, and also for Bets, Joe and their 3 little girls - that God would grant them peace in place of fear and that he would reassure them of his watchful protection. These are my precious nieces, and I ask again that you'd pray for the whole family.
Kaitlyn made a really cool picture for them tonight - it's of a very large hand, and she cut out a picture of Eva and pasted it in the center of the hand. She wrote "Eva is a gift from God. She is in the Shadow of His Hand." It's really cool, and I can't wait for her to show it to Bets. I'm gonna see if I can scan it and post it tomorrow.



2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I will be praying for Eva and your friend. Jimmy DeWan

Anonymous said...

Definitely praying. Is there an update?