PDA

One of the reasons they weren't upping Joshua's feedings at the beginning is because he had an open PDA. This is a duct that is open when babies are in the womb to allow blood to bypass the heart. It will close before birth, but with preemies it sometimes hasn't closed yet. This can make breathing and keeping enough oxygen hard for the baby.

There is two ways to treat a PDA the first is with some medicine and the other is to do a minor surgery which staples it shut. Even though the surgery was minor it still seemed scary to do that to such a tiny baby. They also would take him all the way up to Ogden to do the surgery, and we didn't want Joshua to have to make that trip.

They started Joshua on the medicine; the doctors were willing to do the medicine 3 times before resorting to surgery. The first time valve didn't really close at all. Brian and I started praying really hard that the medicine would work and that they would not have to do surgery. The second course closed the valve up most of the way, but not enough. More prayers were said and the third course closed the valve so we were able to avoid the surgery. They also started giving Joshua more to eat once the valve was closed so it seemed like a super double benefit.

We were really fortunate in the NICU the PDA was the scariest and biggest thing we had to deal with and it is a relatively minor problem. But it was a big deal to us.

Now for your viewing pleasure another NICU picture of Joshua just because I think he is cute.